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I didn't expect the number of followers loss to be over half a billion. Makes me wonder how many accounts were purged. Even if each of the purged account follow
by markblue 8y ago
I didn't expect the number of followers loss to be over half a billion. Makes me wonder how many accounts were purged. Even if each of the purged account followed 100 of the account measured, it still means millions of accounts were purged.
- jandrese 8y agoTwitter accounts were trivially easy to make. Bots could easily churn out tens of thousands or more in just a few hours. The whole service is lousy with bots.
- everdev 8y agoI tried to create multiple accounts (from the same IP mind you) about 3 months ago and many of them required me to verify a phone before registering or got flagged shortly after as potential spam, which was accurate. I was curious how easy it was and for me it wasn't super simple especially the phone verification step.
- jandrese 8y agoThe phone verification step appeared when Twitter finally realized (way too late) that they have a bot problem. A few years ago (before the 2016 election) they didn't give a crap. They've only started purging bot accounts in the past year or so. There was an uproar from the Fox News crowd about how they were being unfairly targeted by liberal Twitter because their subscriber counts were dropping like flies.