Twitter has in the recent past been doing some house cleaning. Weeding out spammers, fakers, and the millions of bots making a lot of noise on the platform leading to inorganically changes in what trending and top influencers.
It latest house cleaning move entails putting a cap on the number of Twitter accounts users can follow in a single day. The social network now restricts users from following more than 400 accounts on a single day; people actually do that?
Previously, a user was allowed to follow up to 1,000 new accounts per day. That limit has now been dropped to just 400.
“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,” explained Twitter.
Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, gave a somewhat detailed explanation on why the social network had to lower the cap.
“So, why 400 per day, and not 100? Or 58? Or 17? 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.
Every choice we make about our rules, limits, and spam-fighting systems has to work for hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of whom use Twitter in every different ways.
Improving the health of Twitter is our top priority, and teams across the company are always working to refine these limits based on what we learn about spammer behavior and as malicious tactics evolve.”