As someone who has managed accounts for business, keeping an authentic follower list to me is about providing a valuable, ethical service to clients. It would b

As someone who has managed accounts for business, keeping an authentic follower list to me is about providing a valuable, ethical service to clients. It would be easy for a client to hire me to increase their followers and for me to do so with the thousands of fake accounts. Instead I choose to provide a true follower increase, meaning people that actually value their product. In most cases business owners and managers are appreciative to this approach. It is better to have 50 followers who engage with your product/service, than to have 1000 followers who do not. Somewhat related, but my follower count stays about the same on average. I go through spurts where I post a lot and then don't post at all. I don't use Twitter that often for direct engagement with individuals, but do from time to time. About a month ago I woke up one day with over a thousand new followers. I thought for a second I had tweeted out something great the night before and was curious what it was that drew so many new eyes. A quick glance at my followers though revealed that ever last one of the new followers was a spam account. To me this devalues the entire ecosystem at Twitter. Twitter has this hard limit on following 2000 people until you reach some undisclosed threshold of followers (presumably close to 2000 followers). I believe that many of the spam accounts are created solely for the purpose of following people to bypass that arbitrary limit. To me though, Twitter has it completely wrong here. It would seem they are encouraging spam accounts by having this limit in place in the first place. There are better ways to detect spam accounts than saying if a user is following >2000 people yet doesn't have 2000 followers they must be spam. Twitter can tell if a user interacts with the systems and tweets on a fairly regular basis. This to me is a better determination of whether an account is spam than simply the number of followers an account has.