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Earlier this week Twitter announced that they were getting rid of locked and suspicious accounts from their platform in an effort to provide integrity to follower counts.
Via Twitter
As part of our ongoing and global effort to build trust and encourage healthy conversation on Twitter, every part of the service matters. Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate.
Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down.
Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop. We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation.
Two sports personalities who were hit the hardest by the Twitter purge turned out to be Ray Lewis and former ESPN host Britt McHenry who both lost an insane amount of fake followers.
Twitter completed its fake account purge today. One person who reportedly bought fake followers was Ray Lewis, who lost about half his followers pic.twitter.com/z8BNzECthv
— Austin Vitelli (@AustinVitelli) July 12, 2018
Another was former ESPN employee Britt McHenry, who lost about 140,000 followers pic.twitter.com/GORSzkcD0r
— Austin Vitelli (@AustinVitelli) July 12, 2018
britt mchenry had 362.8k followers at 5:19 PM yesterday, she has 223k at 9:35 PM now. pic.twitter.com/gUuzyRf2ac
— trey (@TreyfromNY) July 13, 2018