via The New York Times by Julia Jacobs
Many celebrities, politicians and so-called social media influencers found their Twitter followings knocked down a few digits on Thursday as the company slashed tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users’ followers.
The company is taking the action to restore trust in its platform. Many users have inflated their followings with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers.
For example, the actor Ashton Kutcher, an active member since the company’s early days who led many other celebrities to embrace the platform, lost more than a million of his followers. On Wednesday afternoon, he had 19.1 million. By Thursday evening, that was down to 18 million, a drop of nearly 6 percent.
President Trump, who has used Twitter as a way to speak directly to both loyal voters and critics, lost about 340,000 followers in the Twitter purge, knocked down to 53 million from 53.4 millon on Wednesday. His predecessor, President Barack Obama, took a much bigger hit, losing three million followers in about one day. (He started with many more, dropping to 101 million on Thursday from 104 million the day before.)
The complete story here > In Twitter Purge, Top Accounts Lose Millions of Followers