Say Goodbye To Your Spammy Followers

December 18, 2008 @ 12:57 am · Filed under Journal

The Twitter support team has announced that they are in the process of removing suspended accounts from everyone’s followers lists.  Twitter posted the news on the Twitter Status Blog and on Get Satisfaction.  From the Get Satisfaction update:

A long awaited bug fix is going out this week: suspended accounts are being removed from everyone’s “followers” pages.

Expect to see an extreme drop in followers numbers in many cases, as we’ve suspended thousands of accounts for spam over the past few months. Your followers number will now accurately reflect the number of legitimate followers you have on Twitter.

and later in the comments:

…the bug is fixed but the removal of suspended profiles from followers pages will be gradual. In other words, suspended accounts wont vanish from everyone’s followers page at the exact same time; this will happen to different people on different days.

So what does this mean to you?  This will most likely result in a very noticeable drop in your Followers count.  My Followers went from 310 to 292 – a 6% drop.

Many people are obsessed with the number of people who are following them and I’m expecting that this will cause some people to complain and assume that Twitter screwed something up.  For those of us who were aware of this bug, this is good news and another indicator that Twitter is taking their war on spam very seriously.

Coverage elsewhere:

Update:

The Twitter community is starting to notice the drop in followers.  Quite a few people think that the drop in followers is because of something that they said.  Here are some of the reactions that I’ve seen…

follower_drop

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