Twitter has reduced the daily amount of accounts you can follow per day from 1,000 to 400. The company is not trying to hinder your ability to follow every K-pop band; they are trying to prevent spammers.
Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. Who does that? Spammers. So we’re changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400. Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 8, 2019
You might have noticed one of your favorite celebrities or meme accounts beginning to follow you. In a flurry of excitement, you immediately follow them back. However, after some time has passed, your new follower unfollowed you.
Basically, what happened was the account followed as many others as it could, so that users would instinctively follow them back. After amassing an army of followers, the accounts will then unfollow you.
Twitter Head of site integrity Yoel Roth gave the reasoning as to why the company settled on 400 follows.
“In short, we found that 400 is a reasonable limit that allows people to follow the accounts they’re interested in each day while stopping the most spam,” Roth said.
“(A total of) 99.87% of Twitter users are totally unaffected by this lower rate limit. Most people don’t need or want to follow that many accounts. But some legitimate accounts, like businesses providing customer service by DM, actually do need it, and we want to avoid burdening them,” Roth continued.
Twitter announced last year that the company was doing more to combat spam. In May of 2018, the company had targeted and challenged about 10 million accounts suspected of spamming users.
The company also began the following practices to reduce spam:
- Reducing the visibility of suspicious accounts in Tweet and account metrics
- Improving the sign-up process
- Auditing existing accounts for signs of automated sign-up
- Expansion of malicious behavior detection systems
If you are looking to better protect your own security on Twitter, you can now sign in using a security key.
Starting today, you can use a security key for login verification when you sign in to https://t.co/I6k1ntZlAv.https://t.co/Cu3PUyBsxz
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) June 26, 2018
At the end of the day, none of us NEEDS to follow 1,000 accounts. Many of us probably don’t even have 400 counts already. If Twitter can reduce the amount of spam that currently clutters our feed, we don’t care what it costs.
