Don’t be surprised to see the number of people following you on Twitter drop this week.
The platform said tens of millions of accounts previously locked due to suspicious activity will be purged from its follower counts, a closely watched metric on the platform.
The company says “most” people will lose “four followers or fewer,” but more prominent Twitter accounts “will experience a more significant drop.”
“We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
The move, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced in a tweet, is part of a broader effort to safeguard the platform amid mounting scrutiny over the proliferation of trolls, fake news, and disinformation on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.
Twitter stock tanked earlier this week amid investor jitters over a report that the company had suspended more than 70 million accounts in its ongoing battle against misinformation and other abuse. The company later clarified that most of the suspended accounts were inactive and therefore would not impact its closely watched monthly active user metric.
