The San-Francisco headquartered firm was responding to an allegation by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who wrote a letter to newly appointed Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on December 27, alleging that his follower count has frozen since his account was briefly blocked in August last year. He alleged that the social media major company was working under pressure from the Modi government.
“Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate. Twitter has a zero-tolerance approach to platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokesperson told ET in a statement Thursday. “We fight spam and malicious automation strategically and at scale with machine learning tools, and as part of those consistent and ongoing efforts to ensure a healthy service and credible accounts, follower counts can and do fluctuate.”
It added that the US company removes millions of accounts each week for violating its policies on platform manipulation and spam. It added that while some accounts notice a minor difference, in certain cases the number could be higher. “We understand this change can be concerning, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation”.
A report by the Wall Street Journal said that Gandhi’s follower count which stands at 19.5 million had barely increased for several months following an eight-day suspension in August last year.
The data, independently verified by the WSJ using two social-media analytics companies, Emplifi and Social Blade, showed that Gandhi gained an average of nearly 400,000 new users a month in the first seven months of 2021. That plummeted to an average of fewer than 2,500 monthly from September to December, WSJ said. On Friday, his account suddenly gained about 11,000 new followers and since then it has attracted an average of nearly 10,000 more each day—the highest gains since early August, it added.
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Gandhi’s Twitter account ran into a controversy in August 2021 when he tweeted a picture of the family of a rape victim in Delhi. Following complaints from BJP members, Twitter said that he had violated laws and his account was locked for eight days post which it was reactivated.
“The ideological battle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism across the world is being shaped on social media platforms. This places a huge responsibility on those that are at the helm of companies like Twitter,” he wrote.
