D-Day is here.
Twitter announced yesterday that they would be purging millions of accounts today. They specified that they would be removing locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally, so we were to expect a drop in follower counts today. The accounts that Twitter was purging today were locked accounts that the company ‘detected sudden changes in account behaviour’ and if the owners didn’t validate their accounts, they were henceforth purged.
Twitter said that most people would see a change of about 4 followers or fewer but those people with larger follower accounts would experience a more significant drop.
Well, it is currently happening and people have started noticing the drop in follower accounts.
Starting with the more popular accounts on Twitter, Katy Perry, the most followed person on Twitter has lost over 2 million, Twitter itself has lost a cool 7.5 million, Obama over 2 million and interesting enough, Donald Trump has only lost 100,000 followers.
The big-name Twitter accounts who lost the most followers in fake account purge
Followers lost@twitter – 7.5 million!!@KatyPerry – 1.5 million@BarackObama – 2.1 million@taylorswift13 – 2.3 million@YouTube – 2 million@realDonaldTrump – 100,000 https://t.co/9z7tv23Ouf pic.twitter.com/9wMN0ZfoHE
— Matt Navarra (I quit X. Follow me on Threads) (@MattNavarra) July 12, 2018
Coming back to the local scene, we have seen some significant drop in follower counts in some accounts. Controversial blogger, Cyprian Nyakundi, has lost quite a lot of followers, from over 1 million to now below 700K. Another Twitter bigwig @xtiandela also lost a chunk of followers from over a million to now 522K as of writing this article.
Other regular Twitter users have noticed their accounts dropping today thanks to the purge, while others didn’t notice a change at all to their accounts.
https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1017485681592033282
I've lost about 2000 followers in the "Great Twitter Purge" today. With 366,000 followers, I'm sure I had at least 2000 fake or abandoned accounts following me.
Not bad.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) July 12, 2018
I lost 0 followers from the Twitter purge. Guess you’re all real 👾
— Ashley 🐱 (@ashweyashley) July 12, 2018
Well this is not over and this will continue for the rest of the day. I guess now people will get to know their true audiences, but I don’t believe the actual reach would be hampered in any way.
