A recent Twitter operation aimed at cracking down on 'locked' accounts resulted in the world's biggest celebrities losing millions of followers over night.
This 'Twitter crackdown' follows concerns over fake users on social media. Any user whose account is locked for unusual activity -- i.e. being blocked, or sending unusual amounts of Tweets (bots, 'trolls', etc.) -- and users who did not respond to a prompt to verify their identity were eliminated.
As a result, celebrity accounts on Twitter have seen a big drop in numbers overnight! Moving forward, the company will continue to lock accounts who display a sudden change of behavior (harassing celebrities, sending too many unsolicited replies, etc.) With this effort, the social media company hopes too see a boost user trust.
A social media analytics service, Socialblade, analyzed the accounts of the Twitter accounts the most followers: Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ellen Degeneres and the official YouTube account. All of these accounts saw a significant drop of more than 2-million followers each. The most popular accounts have more than 100 million followers.
Sure, losing 2 million followers is undoubtedly a significant drop, but for the likes of Katy Perry and Justin Bieber that loss is only a 2% drop. Twitter's own account on the platform lost 7.7 million followers. I
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