So someone added you to a Twitter list like “dummies,” or “mean people,” or “jerks,” eh?  It’s mean. I know.  And Twitter doesn’t provide any good way for you to get off of that list.

The worst part is, when someone browses to your Twitter profile, they’ll be presented with a listing of “lists” that you’re on, and all visitors will then see that one person, at one point in time, chose to add you to a list with a name that presents their commentary on your character. And Twitter just expects you to live with that.

It seems pretty unfair to me. In its rush to be all “social” and “open,” Twitter has provided a way for others to publicly comment on your character, but they provide no way for you to respond to that commentary.

In my case, I “followed” a guy who I thought had said something funny.  For some reason, he proceeded to add me to a list called “spammers.”  I have no idea why he did that, and Twitter offers me no mechanism to remove that scarlet letter.  I can’t contact him directly through Twitter, either, since you can’t DM people who don’t follow you. 

So now when people visit my Twitter profile, they see that I’m on a list called “spammers,” and I’m just supposed to live with that?

Fortunately, I was able to to find a way to get myself off of that list.  It goes like this.

How to get yourself off of a Twitter list:

1.  Block the person.

2.  Unblock that person.  You’ll then be removed from their list.

3.  Block that person again, so they can’t add you to a list again.

That’s it.  That’s the method.  It works via a bug in Twitter, or perhaps just the inner workings of Twitter, or something like that. 

I noticed that it took a while for the results to become apparent – after doing steps 1-3, my Twitter account still showed that I was on this guy’s list.  But when I checked the list, I saw that my posts had been removed.  It takes a while for the update to propagate through all of Twitter’s servers, so be patient.