Source: Twitter says most recent follower purge is about bots, not politics
Twitter users see their follower counts drop by hundreds to thousands, overnight.
Twitter says its purging accounts they believe are bots. Fake accounts are deleted from Twitter all the time.
I have accounts on Twitter and Instagram and am aware that at any point in time, there are a number of fake accounts following my accounts. Most appear to be business/commercial marketing spam accounts. When Twitter deletes fake accounts and bots, we see our follower counts go down – simply because the accounts have gone away. Such drop offs have nothing to do with the content we have posted.
Automated systems for detecting fake and bot accounts can be error prone.
See my previous post on how such systems, even those having a presumed high confidence rate in their targeting, may incorrectly tag legitimate accounts as bots. I show there how a 98% confident “search” falsely tags twice as many people as it correctly identifies in a specific example scenario. Read it to understand the problem.