Twitter culls spammers from follower lists overnight
If your follower list drops overnight, it’s not something you tweeted (hopefully…). Instead, Twitter is cleaning out spammers and other “data inconsistencies,” which have artificially inflated follower counts.
Twitter says, “Those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.”
Spam continues to be a problem from the nascent microblogging network as false accounts share links to porn or begin following thousands of other accounts with nary a tweet in sight. They also spam Twitter’s trending topics by sticking in popular hashtags into tweets. Twitter has cracked down before, suspending accounts because of “strange activity.”
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.