Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and AICC president Rahul Gandhi have one thing in common: they have lost followers on Twitter.
Several politicians have lost thousands of followers. Mr Naidu lost about 5,194 followers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost 18,613 followers, and Rahul Gandhi lost 12,974 followers.
The decrease in the number of followers is not attributed to politics but to the microblogging platform Twitter addressing the issue of bots and fake followers.
The check was done using an independent tool called Twitter Counter. US President Donald Trump lost 52043 followers while Pope Francis and Hillary Clinton have also lost followers. Actors Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, and Mahesh Babu have lost followers in thousands.
Twitter has made it known that people losing followers does not mean that they have done anything wrong; they are the targets of spam that is now being cleaned up. Fake accounts amplify posts and impact accounts credibility.
The microblogging site has recently been taking more steps to clean up spam and automated activity and close the loopholes that fake followers were taking advantage of. Some of the handles of national parties like BJP @bjp4India and Congress @inc India lost followers.
A Twitter spokesperson said, “We do not have any numbers available which are specific to this clean up. Due to technology and process improvements during the past year, we are now removing 214% more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis. The new protections we’ve developed have already helped us prevent more than 50,000 spammy signups per day,” the official said.
Meanwhile, K.T. Rama Rao, Nara Lokesh, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy and K. Kavitha are adding followers continuously.
Ned Segal, CFO of Twitter tweeted on Tuesday: “Most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted.”
Removing accounts impacts Twitter’s business. The shares were tanking on Monday and erased about $3.1 billion in market value, says Fortune.com, when a report alleged that about 70 million accounts were removed.
Security researcher Srinivas Kodali says, “The purge only shows that they have accepted the problem they have created on the platform and are trying to clean it up. Having fake followers ruins the experience of others, and they don’t want to lose real followers because of these fake accounts.”
