A Twitter spokesperson said follower counts are a visible feature, and the company wants everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate.
“As part of our ongoing and global efforts to build trust and encourage healthy conversations, we regularly do sweeps to remove spammy, malicious, or inactive accounts to make sure that people can trust that what they see on Twitter is reflective of the real-time nature of our service,” the spokesperson added.
Industry insiders said it has been a while since Twitter did such a massive clean up wherein bot accounts that have been inactive for a while get wiped out.
“Other than user-flagged bots and spam reporting of accounts which happens round the clock, once a while, social media platforms do an active clean up. Top users can lose a significant amount of followers at these times. Even Instagram does it from time to time. These cleanups happen periodically,” said Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, founder and CEO of influencer marketing platform Qoruz.
“At these times, even some valid user accounts may be placed under suspension. They do always send a notice to the associated email saying that if it’s a genuine account, the user could unsuspend that account with an appeal. Maybe Twitter will start doing more such cleanups considering they are becoming more creator centric,” he added.
Journalist Tabeenah Anjum stated on the platform on Thursday that she lost 1200 followers while another Twitter user @sunainajairath wrote she lost 500.
Twitter user @twinitisha wrote: “It’s cute how big accounts (some with blue tick as well) with 100k plus followers are complaining about losing a few hundred followers!”
Later, she wrote: “Bot accounts are back btw or whatever you guys lost.”
A person familiar with developments at the company said there may have been some numbers impacted due to a proactive sweeping of spam accounts.
“But some users are now saying they got back their followers,” the person said.
The bot purging seems to have hit other markets as well. Twitter user @KaderAriz who has mentioned Sweden as his location on his profile wrote he lost 22 followers while writing a post on Friday. “I thought it was funny considering the tweet but looks like others also lost some and seems a like Twitter bot purge of some sort.”
A person familiar with these developments on social media platforms said the bots are almost always created by humans, but the accounts activity is programmed, and hence, it is naturally difficult to identify if it is a fake account or a true person behind a suspicious account.
