Twitter: The Purge

On Wednesday Twitter warned users of the social media platform that they might see a sudden drop in Follower counts.

The announcement came via a blog post issued by legal, policy, and trust & safety lead Vijaya Gadde, who explains that over the years twitter has “locked accounts,” when the account suddenly changes behavior, in those cases Twitter contacts the owner and unless the account owner verifies their account, Twitter keeps the account locked with no ability for the user to log-in.

Starting Thursday Twitter will be removing “these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down.”

What to expect: Numbers of followers to shift suddenly, if you use twitter.

What to watch for: Users paying closer than normal attention to the amount of followers for particular accounts, including politicians and celebrities.

Katy Perry has the most twitter followers, she was the first account to break 1 million followers in 2017. As of 10 p.m west coast time she had 110 million followers

Justin Bieber comes in second at 107 million followers

and coming in 3rd is former President Obama with 104 million followers

President Trump comes in somewhere about 18th for most Twitter Followers at 53.4 million followers.

Why it Matters 

As the New York Times reported on Wednesday the amount of removed accounts might total in the “tens of millions,” this mass deletion is expected to affect many users, including those users that have purchased, “fake followers and any others who are followed by suspicious accounts, will see their follower numbers fall.” While Twitter would not give The Times an exact number of “affected users, the company said it would strip tens of millions of questionable accounts from users’ followers.” Which could reduce the total combined follower count on Twitter by as much as 6 percent. This step along with other steps Twitter has taken are, in part a response to Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential Election.

For what it’s worth: In May of 2017, Newsweek reported that over half of President Trump’s followers were, “tweet-less, picture-less accounts that joined the service in May 2017” Newsweek used the service “Twitter Audit Report,” that “assesses the authenticity of one’s followers”

Running an audit today shows, that about 86 percent of President Trump’s followers are real, 7,152,384 followers are fake.

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About Tiff 2521 Articles
Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.

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