Read WriteWeb: “New Twitter Anti-Spam Bot Causes Chaos”
ReadWriteWeb suspects that there is a connection between the controversial new follow limits and yesterday’s major issue with follower / following counts going down. Twitter hasn’t acknowledged any connection (yet).
While we appreciate the fact that the Twitter team is fighting the spam problem … you would think that they would have considered this potential ramification to implementing their new pattern-detecting technology. It’s almost as if Twitter themselves do not even know what would constitute someone being a spammer. If that’s the case, they should ask the community for guidance before rolling out a brand new anti-spam bot.
There is more coverage about this developing story on TechMeme. I’m trying to remain optimistic but if they don’t get this problem resolved quickly it’s going to turn into a real nightmare for Twitter, just a few days after they were featured on the front page of USA Today.
Update #1:
According to WebProNews, Biz Stone from Twitter has denied any connection between the anti-spam efforts and the problem with the Following/Follower counts:
Stone responded to request for comment saying the data loss was not because of recent spam efforts, but instead is a bug. “The followers/followees bug is unrelated to our spam initiatives,” he said. “We worked on it last night but we’ll be looking more into the follower bug today.”
Update #2:
Biz Stone once again denies that the Following/Followers issue has anything to do with the anti-spam bot. This is from a post by Cnet.
We just received an update on the situation from Biz Stone, over at Twitter. He writes, “Some users lost followers as a result of an error during a database upgrade. We replaced followers last night and will be replacing followers today. This is not related to the spam initiative we blogged about the other day.” At least Twitter is hard at work trying to remedy the situation.
Update #3:
Twitter updated their blog: Where Are My Followers
Once again, they denied any connection to the anti-spam initiatives…
Please note that this is unrelated to our ongoing spam initiative as some folks were wondering. Twitter fights spam by putting rules in place to inhibit certain activities. We don’t automatically delete accounts en masse.
Update #4:
4:15 PST – People are starting to report that their Followers / Following numbers have been restored.
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