Jacob Morgan | Best-Selling Author, Speaker, & Futurist | Leadership | Future of Work | Employee Experience

Twitter is Booting Followers or Spammers?

A few minutes ago I had around 500 twitter followers, then all of a sudden I dropped down to around 400 twitter followers.  I wasn’t sure what was going on so I checked Summize, to see if anyone else was having the same problems, sure enough, they were.

twitter bans followers

There are a lot of comments floating around from irritated twitter users, complaining of their sudden drop of followers, and the fact that they are no longer following the same amount of people.  Not sure whether this is just a bug or not as we have not heard anything from anyone on the twitter team.

Of course, the folks with more twitter followers such as Chris Brogan, were hit much harder.

chris brogan twitter followers

There is some speculation that Twitter is simply removing all of the spam bots from their user index, in which case around 25% of my followers were spammers, the 25% number does seem to be consistent for very users though.

twitter bans followers or spammers

So, this of course begs the question of, is twitter booting followers or spammers?

Are you having the same problem?

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2 thoughts on “Twitter is Booting Followers or Spammers?”

  1. According to http://status.twitter.com/ :

    “We’re still in the process of recovering from the missing follower/following problem that occurred earlier today. Over the next several hours, you may see inaccurate counts or timeline inconsistencies as the correct data is propagated to all parts of the system.

    One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.

    As we push out the changes to fix this afternoon’s problem, the counts will be updated to reflect the latest numbers.”

  2. The problem with that “status” is it’s now 14 hours after the problem was to be resolved in “several” hours, and lots of people only lost followers after the “restoration” began. Some people lost 100%.

    So, Twitter Status, is this not fixed yet, a new problem, or a new set of rules we all have to play by? Why not say “still working on it … still working on it .. done!” instead of just leaving it as “Even after this recovery is complete …”

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