Twitter’s new rule is going to cost celebrities a lot of followers
Yesterday, Twitter announced that they will no longer count a large number of accounts for the number of followers users have. The accounts concerned are not blocked, but ‘frozen’ because Twitter has observed a sudden change in activity. It could be that an account suddenly produces a lot of mentions or replies that nobody has asked for, throws out misleading links or is blocked by a large number of other accounts after they have been named.
Frozen accounts can not tweet, like or retweet and are normally defrosted by Twitter after a certain period, because frozen accounts are usually not bots, but real people. However, to give a little more clarity about how many active Twitterers someone is following, they no longer count as active followers. That means, according to Twitter, that the average account loses about four followers, but for celebrities with millions of followers it obviously ticks.
No growth at all
This effectively means that a lot of accounts with many followers have lost thousands of followers, as you can see in the accounts of Trump (-100.000 to now) and Obama (- 400,000 so far). According to Twitter, that might hurt, but it is necessary to ensure the transparency and credibility of the number of followers that someone has.
The service is in any case making fake accounts disappear, because in the last two months more than 70 million questionable accounts have been removed. That means of course that Twitter is far from experiencing a major growth, because effectively Twitter gets smaller. The market was not happy with that, because at the beginning of this week the share of Twitter fell quite sharply. Unfairly, a number of analysts said. Twitter’s figures never accounted for these accounts anyway and so in reality there should be nothing to change in terms of active users. The only drawback is that the numbers fall behind the number of followers of everyone. If that is the price that we all have to pay (known people first) that is fine.