Re blogged from WebProNews
Recently,Twitter announced that they were cleaning out spammers and addressing “data inconsistencies”. What does this mean for you, the Twitter user? You might see a significant drop in your following and follower numbers.
Did your Twitter follower count take a hit from this cleanup? Tell us.
Below you can see my modest counts pre-cleanup and post-cleanup. By the looks of it, I had 40 spam Twitter accounts following me. Excuse me while I go wash my hands:
Here is the full details from Status.Twitter:
“For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.
However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.”
Did you have a big drop with your Twitter account? Let us know.
Sally offered this comment
Twitter Corrects Follower & Following Counts
Hi Jeremy,
I noticed that my followers count dropped from 798 down to about 710 and wasn’t sure why. Word on the ‘tweets’ is that there are many people who follow you until you follow back, then they drop you like a hot potato. I assumed this was the case however now I see that it was a result of cleaning out the twitter bird cage. A couple months ago I noticed someone following me under 24 different IDs and reported them. I did hesitate for a moment since I knew that all those followers would greatly impact me, since I only had about 200 followers at that time. But the hesitation was momentary, my conscience won over, I did report them and they were all blocked and removed.
Now if only they would do something about the folks who constantly and repeatedly send out ads for their affilatiated products. 
Thanks for the post and for inviting feedback. With the thousands (or millions) of news sites on the internet today, Web Pro News continues to be my main source for valuable, timely and even cutting edge web news. Keep up the great work!!
Amber left this comment:
“…speculating again and again why i lost 28 followers at once.I thought that maybe I send some offending tweet or I have not been using twitter recently so, these followers unfollowed me but, now I know.Thanks for the information.Another evidence of no rule – policy of twitter that is I think Twitter has no rule or method for detecting spam and many genuine accounts are suspended repeatedly as spam.”
“At least, they could at least inform in some way about this clean -up , saving lot of twitterers trouble and excessive worry.”
My response:
re: amber’s “at least inform in some way…”
Amber, the moment twitter discloses even a tiny snippet of what their criteria is to determine what IS and what ISN’T spam, the spammers then have a base line to reverse engineer the spam filter and game the system.
Google has (had) this problem and now Google is forced into a “disinformation campaign”, with a Public Party Line with respect to what Is and Isn’t going to get a spammer discounted and what’s really going on under the hood of the algorithm.
We may not like what appears to be arbitrary behavior of social networks and non disclosure is certainly likely to lead to abuse of power by the body that screens what is and isn’t appropriate (read digg.com) for a social network BUT…
As long as one website has what others want/need (the power to make or break by anointing who is and isn’t deemed Important or Authoritative) then we’re all going to have to live with it.
Every way one could possibly dream up to game Google’s system has already been thought up, tried, tested, caught, improved, caught again, some of it allowed to stay as long as it doesn’t hurt Google’s bottom line>>> the game goes on and on without end
David Bruce Jr Maryland Search Engine Marketing Consultant
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240 315-1515 Cell
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