Mass follow/unfollow LinkedIn connections

~~~ Disclaimer. Make sure you fully understand what you’re doing. ~~~

For whatever reasons, you might come into a situation where it could be handy to follow or unfollow all LinkedIn connections associated with a given account. Unfollowing connections will neither remove them, nor will unfollowed connection be notified. Of course there’s no UI for that. However, here’s how you can do it.

(0) open a browser and login to https://www.dhirubhai.net (an active session is required)

(1) go to https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/following and load all your contacts into the DOM (a fun task: scroll down, wait, scroll down, wait, etc.)

(2) open developer tools (right mouse click, inspect element), look for 

<ul id=“emberXXX” class”feed-following-list mb5 ember-view”>

The XXX stands for a 2-digit or 3-digit number (see picture below). In this example, it’s the ‘ember58’ we’re looking for. 

(3) go to the console in developer tools, insert the following lines (not the comments).

// configuration

let ember_digits = XXX
// XXX is the 2-digit/3-digit id looked up in step (2), 58 in the example screen shot … insert the number found in your DOM


let what_to_do = 'Follow'
// what_to_do = 'Follow' —> every time a button with a label different than what_to_do is found, it will be clicked (and in turn changes to the desired state) … this is the configuration to mass-follow your connections
// set to what_to_do = ‘Following’ to unfollow your connections


// execution

> document.querySelectorAll("#ember58 > li > button").forEach(function(button) { if (button.innerText === what_to_do) { button.click() } } )

// when all contacts have been loaded into the DOM, this line above will evaluate whether you’re following a contact or not; if not, the button will be pressed

(4) open a second window with the link from step (1); reload from time to time and observe the counter stating the number of people you follow. Don't reload the browser window you entered the command in, there's following/unfollowing activity running in the background that will otherwise be terminated. Depending on the number of contacts you're faced with, this might take a few moments.