Did You Lose Many Twitter Followers This Week?

I went out to lunch the other day and by chance I noted that I happened to have 14.5 Twitter followers. 90 minutes later I got how and noticed I had 14.2 Twitter followers. How did that happen? Some kind of organized assault by the Blue Dogs or the NRCC (or DCCC)? I was amused and asked some of my friends. They had all lost a load of followers so at least it wasn't just me being singled out. I figured out that Twitter was doing what they had promised to do-- but it wasn't about getting rid of bots.

Vijaya Gadde is Twitter's lead counsel and the company's director of communications and last Wednesday she posted a blog explaining what was going on. "Most people," she wrote, "will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop." One of the things they look for is accounts that tweet misleading links.

Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll 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.

...In most cases, these accounts were created by real people but we cannot confirm that the original person who opened the account still has control and access to it.

Spam accounts (sometimes referred to as bots) typically exhibit spammy behavior from the beginning, are increasingly predictable by our systems, and can be automatically shut down with our technology. You can learn more about our ongoing work to prevent spam on Twitter here

The 3 most followed people on Twitter lost immense numbers of followers:

• Katy Perry lost 3 million followers
• Justin Bieber lost 2.7 million followers
• President Obama lost 2.4 million followers

The repulsive illegitimate fake "president," Señor Trumpanzee, lost 204,000 of his 53.3 million followers. Obama has about double the number of Twitter followers than the illegitimate fake "president" that Putin installed has. You don't lose anything by not following him because most of what he tweets is self-serving lies.

But One Country by Chip Proser