User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: February 22, 2017/@comment-26569706-20170225212532/@comment-5973717-20170225215536

If it interests you, there's a more direct method then that.

There's a way to turn off automatic following of pages: Go to your preferences, click "Email", uncheck all of the boxes in "Follow Pages I...", and click "Save"; it will turn off automatic following.

This way, the only time the system will add you to a following list is when you explicitly click the "Follow" button, or when an admin highlights something. This won't remove items that are already on your list, so you'll still need to unfollow them manually.