Twitter Reduces Number of Accounts Users Can Follow Per Day to 400

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In its continued crackdown on bot accounts and spammers, Twitter is cutting down on accounts Twitter users can follow per day, from 1,000 to just 400.

“As a part of our commitment to building a healthy service, we remain focused on stopping spam and abuse on Twitter. We found that having a high daily follow rate contributed to follower churn, and as a result, we are reducing the daily follow rate limit from 1,000 to 400.”

Twitter

Until this new update, users have been able to follow up to 1,000 accounts per day. But now twitter is more than halving it. Once a user hits his daily limit of 400 follows, he receives a message stating that he will be unable to follow more persons until after 24 hours.

A Huge Blow to Spam and Influencer Accounts

One of the simplest Twitter growth hack is to follow a large number of persons, check who follows you back (which many will do, out of courtesy), then unfollow most of them. Then repeat the process over and over.

This is to ensure that they amass lots of followers far greater than their following thus giving them the huge Twitter audience and of course “influencer status”. But upon realising that spam accounts exploit this to rapidly grow their networks by following then unfollowing Twitter accounts in a bulk, aggressive or indiscriminate manner, Twitter is using this limit to curb the act.

This is a huge blow to influencers, spammers and those using automated third-party tools to artificially inflate their presence.

But for the average Twitter user, the limit is reasonable and might even have no effect as many have not even followed up to 400 users in all their period of usage. Also, they will get to receive fewer notifications from the same people who unfollow only to follow again later.

In addition to this limit, there are also ratios that go into effect once a user is following a certain number of accounts. Every Twitter user is allowed to follow up to 5,000 accounts. Once it reaches that mark, the user has to wait until he has more followers before it can follow additional accounts.

These limits are not the only steps Twitter has taken recently to tackle the spam problem on its platform. The company has also updated its reporting tools to allow users to report fake accounts; as well as new verification measures to identify spammers.


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