If you notice this morning that your follower count on Twitter dropped dramatically, don’t be alarmed. It is just Twitter cracking down on spam accounts and bots that automatically follow people. So chances are those weren’t real people anyway.
The drop is a big topic on Twiitter (search for “spam”). This isn’t the first time Twitter has purged spam accounts. What is alarming, however, is that some people affected are complaining that not only did their follower count drop, but that all of their followers and people they followed were wiped out. Oops. That is the same effectively as starting from scratch.
Spam accounts on Twitter are becoming a big problem, inflating follower counts and setting the stage for unwanted commercial come-ons and scams. (And you thought spam on Gmail was bad). As Twitter inches towards becoming a place to do business, it needs to sweep the spammers out of its system. Inevitably, some innocent bystanders will suffer collateral damage.
This is wonderful.
This will keep things simple. I am quite sure many people will be disappointed, but it is good for Twitter.
As fast as they go, so fast they will return.
And if it actually works in the long run, be happy that your 100+ followers were not real – mostly they helped compromise people’s online security in some way or the other, in a significant way. So your account is now not part of the botnet so to say.
This is a great move.
Actually, I think Twitter is just cleaning up data which was not synched up. I noticed that when some obvious spammer started following me, the count went up. Suppose this follower had an explicit Avatar – this was removed from my follower list quit quickly (by Twitter, not by me). However, the count stayed up when this happened.
And so, while it may be cleaning up spammers, I think it is also reconciling data (since I still have some obvious spammers as followers).
yep thats right, the spammer was removed long back only the numbers were not updated!
I think that the spammers and advertisement services took it too far when they did not create any mechnism to recognize themsleves as a commenrical/paid tweet.
I may be naive, but I think that opt in/out mechanism like this one – http://snipr.com/nv62b , are the way to go. This way, webmaster can use paid commnets/tweets/content as an AdSense alternative or opt-out if they’re not intersted.
On my personal account, I saw a drop of 6 followers from the 560 I have
i couldn’t agree with this more. my twitter account was littered with a few blatant spam accounts. i can sleep soundly now that my following is more legit than before
People are complaining because they were all using these “get more followers” scams to get what the rest of us call “spammers” to follow them.
IMHO no loss here. Sucks if you paid for such a service, but if you fell for it… I have a bridge to sell you. DM me for details.
lol yeah seriously… I’d be more worried after learning that all my followers were spam bots rather than the fact that I have none left. All those friends you thought you had? Yep, spam bots.
But they were all hotties!
Interestingly, the social experiment @MLMGUY doesn’t seem to be losing steam at all!
http://twitter.com/mlmguy
“He” sent out two tweats in February (and no more), followed NOBODY, and has 445 followers.
The bots are so powerful that when i click on each trend topics i would get a few followers, twitter needs to do a better job of policing. I don’t wanna spend time cleaning up the spams.
Oh well, not a big loss.
Twitter is only used by businesses to advertise and communicate with customers. Oh and self important people who think anyone really gives a damn about what they say when they tweet that they have woken up or linking to a picture on Fail Blog.
If that’s true, explain my Twitter feed. Exactly what business am I advertising? I use Twitter to share things that interest me and talk to interesting people.
I believe he would put you in the second category he mentioned.
Why would you want a follower who was just a spam account? Are people so hung up on a number? Is it some sort of ego boost…oh wait, nevermind.
Yeah, it’s definitely an ego boost.
I think it’s stupid that people are whining about lost followers. If all their followers were spammers, then they didn’t have real followers to begin with!
BTW how spammers are able to follow peoples without that these personns be notified by email ? I never understood that.
Great to hear Twitter getting a handle on the spam accounts – they were really increasing in number lately.
It’s great to hear spammers are getting the shaft. I noticed a significant drop in my followers. It’s no fun if you’re a user and get all your followers get deleted but getting rid of the bots will only make the experience that much better. http://ziggytek.com/
I lost 140 followers in total, most of whom were legitimate accounts I had been interacting with for over two years. I was also left with a further 62 spam/bot followers that I had to manually block today.
Two years worth of relationship building crapped on by the Twitter bird.
ha ha, right.
Good move. Any idea what percentage of accounts are spambot accounts? For the record, I personally type all my dms even though may seem spammy at times.
Typing them doesn’t make them not spam.
The fact you even admit they “may seem spammy at times” pretty much confirms what they are.
I think there’s a fine line between “spam” and a simple DM intro. Most followers appear to intro themselves with either a link to their sites or their services (including “Get 15,000 followers today!”). I don’t consider this true canned ham unless they repeat alot or such followers become clones repeating the same stuff over and over.
Many twitter users are on twitter to promote themselves, their services or product (the main if not only reason I’m currently on the site). I’m not a “sales” type so anything sales oriented sometimes seems spammy to me. My DM intro to followers includes a thank you and a link and pitch to my site. After that, I don’t typically DM pitches. Are those DM intro’s spam? I hope not but appreciate any feedback.
Of course, if anyone doesn’t like someones tweets or DMs they can unfollow.
they would be spam to me. it’s the internet version of a guy trying to pick up on every woman who looks at him, or a panhandler who spots you a half-block away.
So this is the reason why I lost about 100 followers. But thanks for doing this one. I hate spammers.
It was about time. For a while it felt like going back in time and posting to spam and crap infested forums.
Should do thse cleanups on a weekly basis. Thanks Twitter
Googl should apply this to their search results.
spam = Results 1 of about 251,000,000 for spam [definition]. (0.22 seconds
While I was surprised when I saw my follower count drop, I’m glad this move was made. This helps maintain the value of Twitter to the social media world and businesses.
I lost 75 followers overnight, and not a single one seems important, so they were probably all spam bots anyway. Saves me the trouble of having to go into my followers and blocking the obvious bots.
To those who signed up for any “get a BAZILLION followers by signing up here!” too bad for you, waste of your money, and seriously, are you THAT desperate for attention?
I must be careful how I submit messages on twitter as I have a standard format to inform people that I have uploaded many more apps to giveaway on my website.
I just hope Twitter dont view my messages as spam as the wording is the same, I just copy and paste it everytime I have updated my site
i signed up for twitter just to check out the interface. I didn’t follow anybody. Couple hours later I already had spam bots following me.
Some of the followers I lost I had no idea that they were spam bots, yet some of my followers that I know for sure are spam bots still remain. Interesting.
I lost approximately 20 followers. I hate spammers too.
i lost like about 17 followers, but i am not complaining.
The problem is that if you happen to be following more than 2000 people, the loss of followers becomes an issue.
I was following 2500 people and 2700 people were following me. When twitter deleted the spammers, I lost 450 followers, automatically forcing twitter to not allow me to follow anyone else unless I had deleted 300 people. Have you ever tried to delete 300 followers? It is a SLOW process.
to techcrunch and the above posters:
if you post your @name id from twitter, isn’t this just open invitation for a spider to crawl techcrunch and spam the above posters?
I wonder how twitter is going to solve the spam problem because their system is so open and interconnected.
I lost around 20 followers, luckily I didn’t lose anybody I followed so it didn’t affect me a whole lot.
The sweep killed at least some real accounts. One of my clients has an account that is very real and very interactive, with 10-15% more followers than follows–nothing automated, you name it. It was suspended without explanation a few days ago. We flyspecked the rationales offered by twitter for account suspensions, and the account shouldn’t have tripped any of them, unless several competitors blocked the account for malicious reasons. There have been almost no proactive follows for two months now, for honk’s sake. I know they need to clean things up, but they also need to realize that this sort of thing has real consequences for people and exercise some care about it.
At any rate, we’ve sent our objections, but have heard nothing back, and the account has not yet been restored after several days.
Finally they’re doing something about spammers.
But I wonder though… how many users will twitter have left after this, because it seems as if only every 10th user is real.
Yeah, I saw my Twitter following drop by 30. Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. I’ve alawys preached that it’s now how big your Twiiter is, it’s how you use it. I actually thought about doing some “follower” purging myself. But I don’t think that a Twitter purge has to create collateral damage. It seems to me there’s away around this.
well if twitter would search on google , there are people who sell the services of creating x no of followers for you for an y amount.
No of of followers just to boost your ego .
I routinely go through and delete spammers in my followers list – so when twitter did this cull, my number stayed the same.
I lost 35 of my 148 followers. I also still have a fair amount of spammers to block. Thanks, I guess?
doesn’t look like Ashton Kutcher lost any. Funny, you think there would be a few robot account in his 2.9 million.
Does anyone know if any other big celebrity lost followers?
i didn’t lose that many because i frequently take a look at my list and ban anyone suspect. you have to do it as people join and keep up with it.
if people look at my follower list i want them to see quality, and the first set they see are the last people who joined — so you have to have a clean last/first page.
that’s my philosophy at least.
Twitter is pretty responsive if you call/email the right people in asking about account suspension.
You know how much of a problem it is when CNN are following anit-spam groups
I think the funniest part of this isn’t even the “wah I lost X followers” part. People starting from scratch must have lost not only all of their followers, but all of the people they themselves were following. That means there must have been real people out there who were ONLY following spambots, and only being followed by spambots. Why would you even sign up for Twitter in that case?
Interesting news. I thought I ‘lost’ more than 200 followers due to a tweet I made yesterday. I’m glad I’m not that obnoxious
I’d rather have REAL people follow me than spambots. By the way, I am News4Tech on twitter!
we had literally pages and pages of spammers, it deleted over 700 of them today – about 599 had the same picture (some hot young girl talking about chinese spices or an ebook or how to use twitter)
I am glad Twitter is cracking down since there are so many spam accounts out there. Having a lower number of followers is worth the cleanup–plus I’d rather be sending my Tweets out to real people.
What people are having a hard time understanding is.. they didn’t lose ANY (ZERO) “Followers”… they lost spammers! THANK YOU Twitter!
sad. it was good to know at least some pathetic creature out there likes your tweets…
Good move by Twitter. I lost about 1000 of my 22800 followers. Lost a couple not a biggie. I would rather have a clean Twitter following. The crack down was much needed. A spammer by the name of followermonitor lost over 9,000 followers. Companies such as Yahoo lost about 1,000.
Spam accounts though… They follow you, they’re obviously spam, you ignore them and they don’t bother you at all? It’s totally ineffective spamming, can’t be a good ROI for the spammers at all!
I lost approximately 30 followers, i had 82 followers and now i have 50, i signed in a webpage called extrafollowers.com before that i had 62 followers and after i signed in, my followers started to grow up to 82 and today i only have 50 followers, but is anoying cause this webpage is updating my twitter automatically “Get More Followers blabla…” and I’m sick of this ,does anyone know how to stop it??.. sorry for my english…
Haha… so that’s where all my followers went!
Twitter Fail…
Hardly! I’m thrilled to be rid of the spam in my Tweet Diet.
The purge lets us community building folk keep away the ridiculous come ons from the rest of the people under the tent.
But for the people who lost their entire following? Damn, that hurts.
Next thing you know there will be ‘Twitter Insurance’.
Good deal…Twitter finally realized these do no user any good.
This is a great idea, and even though it looks like you have less followers if you really think about it the spam followers weren’t really “following” you in the first place. Whole idea is for humans to follow other humans.
Isn’t it?
I lost about 124 followeres. But I’m glad that Twitter did this. This will be good for new people who are joining, they won’t think that they are followed by people when they aren’t.
Okay, as of an hour ago when I first read this article my count had gone down by 10 or so from yesterday. I just checked again and it’s back up by 9 who are clearly porn bots. Anyone else?
I checked an hour ago when I first read this story and indeed my count had fallen by about 10-12 from yesterday. I looked just now it’s back up by 9 that are clearly porn bots. Anyone else?