I think there's a special silence enveloping Indian social media feeds, and it's not because they're logging off. It's a ringtone that played everyday in your notifications until it stopped, but not because they went away, it's because they were aware of the problem and chose to exit. It's now called soft blocking. What was once a Twitter-specific hack has become the go-to emotional tool for a generation born post-#MeToo that has been used to navigating relationships by following people on the platform seemingly as much as by phone.

The mechanics are almost ridiculously easy. A user temporarily unfollows a user, thereby removing the latter from the former's followers list, and then unfollows the former again. The result is great on most platforms that use a follow system (Instagram, X, Facebook, Tumblr), and it effectively puts the two in a position of digital strangers. The target is not completely cut off. They may still look for their profile, still send them a message, still technically be in the other person's orbit. What they miss out on is the passive access, the drip-feed of stories, posts and updates that enabled them to keep tabs on an ex, a situationship or a sour friendship. It is not a wall, it is a closed gate, but with the porch light on.

In this moment what matters is not the trick itself, which the internet has been using quietly since about 2018, but how well it's been embraced as the emotional register of those in their 20s. For a generation that has never known relationships and situationships without an online component, digital boundaries can be as tangible as real ones, and soft blocking is an act of quiet control and not revenge. No unfollow spree to friends, no public confrontation to explain later. Just a simple and private access withdraw, performed without any message sent.

The "behaviour" is analysed by researchers studying this behaviour on Twitter, and is described in almost architectural terms. According to a 2025 study on the platform, softblocking shows us how users are exercising agency in using platform tools to perform social work that these tools were never originally intended to do, and that there's a wider culture of wanting to reciprocate when it comes to disconnecting from others online. Basically, users are exploiting the social media platform's tools and systems to enforce etiquette that social media platforms never programmed for. A newer academic work, called the Digital Boundary Ambiguity Scale, released this year, takes it one step further and considers the fuzzy line between acceptable relationship behavior online as a psychological state that can be measured instead of a vague gripe. The scale was designed particularly as a result of the merging of digital technology in romantic relationships, and the development of a legitimate uncertainty amongst couples about what behaviour is acceptable now.

Therapists tend to be supportive but warts and all. Soft blocking can be a healthy strategy for maintaining one's peace following a breakup, but it can be an issue when it takes the place of a conversation one is owed by another person, says marriage and family therapist Sara Lichstein. The distinction between boundary and avoidance is a lot of work in this discussion of the trend, as both are functions of the same tool: hiding.

All this has a numbers story underneath, and it is no small story. India now has over 500 million social media users, which represents about a third of the country's population, with Instagram growing to between 480 million and 517 million accounts in the country and WhatsApp the single largest network by number of active users. Indian users spend about two hours and 44 minutes per day on these platforms, and nearly three hours on them everyday among Gen Z, which has the highest engagement rate of any age group tracked. That's not 'incidental' screen time, it's a part-time relationship where the only interaction is on a feed, and that means that when they pull someone out of that feed, there's real emotional pain. This cohort of Gen Z also has a commercial aspect to keep an eye on: They account for close to ₹1.2 trillion in spending power, which is disproportionate to the size of the social media users base their engagement patterns are more likely to cement platform loyalty for life.

Such a shift is precisely the reason that the dating and relationship-tech business has begun to take notice of India and not written it off as adolescent drama. In private strategy discussions and in public comments, executives creating matchmaking and social products have started to debate that "graduated withdrawal" features like mute, close friends lists, soft blocking, remove-follower are not tools that people misuse to avoid maturity, but a sign that users have more and more come to expect emotional nuance that the binary “follow or block” never had in the first place. Soft blocking is not cowardice appearantly in app language. It’s a fairly complex answer to a world where full surveillance of someone’s life is an accidental byproduct, and it's a warning to platform builders that the next competitive advantage might not be a way to keep people connected, but a way to help them disconnect gracefully.

None of which answers the more difficult question lurking below the trend: Are people raised to have strong boundaries on every relationship getting better at setting them or simply better at avoiding the conversations that boundaries used to entail? Probably both, depending on the week and on the person and how much courage would it have required to have a hard conversation.