On Wednesday, Twitter announced that it would adopt a new strategy that will see the number of followers for Twitter users reduce.
It was announced that the social media platform is partaking in a practice of purging locked accounts from Twitter user’s followers count.
The removal of the locked accounts will be done globally this week.
[caption caption="Twitter followers count"]
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This is part of continued efforts aimed at cleaning up conversations and will have an impact on active user members.
Locked accounts are the profiles that Twitter has blocked the users from accessing either temporarily or permanently.
This is done for reasons such as suspect behavior of an account being compromised or hacked.
In a blog post by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy and trust and safety lead, stated that the move would boost account credibility since followers counts are public.
“In most cases these accounts were created by real people but we cannot confirm that the original person who opened the account still has the control and access of it,” he indicated.
He also warned that followers count may continue to change regularly as part of the ongoing practice to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts.
An investigation done by the New York Times in January showed that some companies made money by inflating the number for celebrities and business executives.
Twitter responded to this by removing millions of fake accounts from the platform.
The company also purges a million fake accounts on average every day.
[caption caption="Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey"]
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