Amid a host of changes brought to micro-blogging platform Twitter since the takeover by Canadian billionaire and now the chief executive officer (CEO) of the company, it has now been announced that users are likely to witness a drop in follower count.
This comes amid the recent decision of Twitter to take away “legacy blue ticks” from verified accounts leading to several Bollywood celebrities including Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, and Alia Bhatt to lose their blue ticks. This left only those individual Twitter users who are paying for Twitter Blue to have verified blue checkmarks.
And now, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the company will be removing accounts that have been inactive on the platform for “several years”. This is likely going to lead to downfall in follower count, said Musk.
Taking to Twitter, he wrote, “We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop.”
However, the announcement was met with people on Twitter questioning the move and asking Elon Musk to reconsider on the decision.
A Twitter user named John Carmack wrote, “I may be reading this incorrectly, but if you are actually deleting inactive accounts and all their historic tweets, I would STRONGLY urge you to reconsider.”
He further wrote, “Letting people know how many “active” followers they have is good information, but deleting the output of inactive accounts would be terrible. I still see people liking ten year old tweets I made, but the threads are already often fragmented with deleted or unavailable tweets. Don’t make it worse!”
However, in a reply to Carmack, Elon Musk said that the accounts will instead be archived, but it was important to free up abandoned handles.
Musk wrote, “The accounts will be archived. But it is important to free up abandoned handles.”
Many users on the platform suggested that the move will lead to a “land grab” for handles that are made free and a situation might arise where someone may come up and take control of legacy handles and start selling them to people.
