Twitter is taking a major step ahead in cleaning in its platform, in order for it to look more legit. In achieving this, it will start by eliminating spammers.
“Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. Who does that? Spammers. So we’re changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400. Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine”, tweeted the company from its official account.
According to Twitter’s Help Center, once you hit the follow limit you’ll get a message saying “You are unable to follow more people at this time.”
However, that number doesn’t apply to Verified accounts. If you’ve got the blue check mark, you can still follow up to 1,000 accounts per day, ostensibly because the site knows you’re not a spammer. Likewise, Twitter also limits the total number of accounts you can follow to 5,000.
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Further explaining the rationale behind the decision, Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, said that the company decided 400 was “a reasonable limit”.
“We found that nearly half of all accounts who made more than 400 follows per day were churning. That amounted to more than 20m follows each day, and a high rate of blocks and spam reports – a clear signal that inorganic follows are super annoying,” Roth said on Twitter.
“99.87pc of Twitter users are totally unaffected by this lower rate limit. Most people don’t need or want to follow that many accounts. But some legitimate accounts, like businesses providing customer service by direct messages, actually do need it, and we want to avoid burdening them.”
The announcement follows a chain of events that began earlier this year, with Mashable reporting in February that Twitter had suspended three social media companies that had designed Twitter apps to rapidly follow and unfollow accounts.
