Egos have been bruised on Twitter after the social network initiated a change to how it tracks followers that saw some of the most popular users lose millions from their count.
Following the change on Friday, which removed from the count accounts that have been suspended or locked by Twitter for abuse, some of the most popular users had hundreds of thousands, or millions, fewer followers than they had a day before.
The biggest drops were reserved for those with the biggest followings.
In the UK, for example, where all of the members of One Direction regularly rank in the top 10 most-followed accounts, Harry Styles lost 877,000 followers, bringing him to 32 million, and former bandmate Niall Horan lost 856,000, bringing him to 39 million.
Adele, the most-followed British woman on Twitter, lost 928,000 followers to bring her to just under 28 million.
However, accounts lost noticeably more followers if they had been popular on Twitter for a long time.
That seems to explain discrepancies like US President Donald Trump (340,000 followers lost, bringing him to 53 million) and former US president Barack Obama (2.3 million followers lost, bringing him to 101 million); or Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (7,000 followers lost, bringing him down to 1.8 million) and Stephen Fry, one of the earliest celebrity adopters of the site, who lost almost 400,000 of his 13.3 million followers.
Fry noticed the absence.
“What the heckfire? 400,000 followers expunged! At a stroke? Nearly half a million of my devoted adherents were BOTS? It explains so much. At least I can now relax in the knowledge that we scattered lonely survivors are the finest and fairest. We’ve lost the maniacs and trolls,” he tweeted.
When Twitter announced the crackdown, it said it expected to see the typical follower count drop by about 6 percent.
The company locks accounts for various reasons, from spam detection or harassment, to the discovery that login credentials have been leaked on other sites.
While they were commonly referred to as bots, that was not always the case, said Vijaya Gadde, from Twitter’s trust and safety team.
“In most cases, these accounts were created by real people, but we cannot confirm that the original person who opened the account still has control and access to it,” she said.
The rationale for the change was to restore an element of trust to a social network that has often struggled with that commodity.
Just to prove that no one is immune, Twitter’s own account had 63 million followers on Wednesday. Now it is down to just 55 million.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS