Did You Just Lose A Ton Of Followers Overnight? Don’t Worry, There’s A Good Reason

Over the past couple of days you may have been shocked to find that you had lost tens, if not hundreds of your followers. At first glance that can be a bit disconcerting. Did i say something that people didn’t like? Was I being too controversial? Do I smell?

Not to worry, it seems that Twitter is in the minddle of doing some housecleaning, and has removed hundreds of spam accounts. Sure it stinks to lose all those followers, but you don’t really want them following you anyway, do you?

From timscullin.com

Seems Twitter has run a spam purge.

What’s that?

You know how sometimes while searching through twitter accounts you’ll see “This Twitter account has been suspended due to strange activity”. It’s actually just a nice way of saying “This is a suspected spammer”, not “They were saying some weird stuff and we got worried”.

The typical process is for the account to be suspended without question for 7 days. After that the account holder can email twitter support and have their account unsuspended if they agree to follow the twitter rules. However if the account holder doesn’t email the account remains suspended. After a while these need to be deleted. This follower drop seems to be Twitter purging these inactive ”strange” accounts.

So yes you may have lost a few followers, but don’t fret. Asides from making your follower ratio look better they weren’t doing much. At least now you wont be spammed by them should the holder decide to revive their suspended accounts.

Tagged as: Commentary