Digital Marketing News

Twitter Removes Locked Accounts from Follower Counts

On last Wednesday, Twitter published a new official blog post about their steps to keep working on saving the healthy conversations on its platform and to build trust and confidence in using Twitter.

Twitter announced its intention to remove the locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally, which will cause a big decreasing in the number of followers displayed on many profiles.

“As part of our ongoing and global effort to build trust and encourage healthy conversation on Twitter, every part of the service matters. Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate.”

Twitter said that the normal users will see a change of four followers or fewer, but the celebrities and public figures will experience a more significant drop. It also added that in the next few days, there will be more changes and follower counts may continue to change more.

“We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation.”

As explained by Twitter, they are locking the accounts based on noticing sudden changes in the user behavior, which include Tweeting a large volume of unsolicited replies or mentions, Tweeting misleading links, or if a large number of accounts block the account after mentioning them.

In this situation, Twitter contacts the account’s owner to confirm if they still have control of it before locking their accounts and removing it from the follower counts forever.

“If we detect sudden changes in account behavior, we may lock the account and contact the owner to confirm they still have control of it.”

Twitter mentioned that the locked accounts are different from spams or bots and in most cases, as these accounts were created by real people. Also, Twitter mentioned that removing locked accounts from followers doesn’t impact Monthly Active User (MAU) or Daily Active User (DAU).

In the other side, Twitter CFO Ned Segal commented on the new changes in a series of tweets on his official account on Twitter. He said that removing locked accounts from follower counts will not affect the number of Twitter’s users which currently stands at 330 million.

“Most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted,” Segal said.

“If we removed 70 million accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us. Look forward to talking more on our earnings call July 27!” Segal said in another tweet.

  • Subscribe for our newsletter!

    COPYRIGHTS DIGITAL MARKETING COMMUNITY 2019