Twitter users in India are suddenly complaining about huge drop in their follower count. While some users complained about losing hundreds of followers within minutes others said that thousands of followers vanished suddenly.
Meanwhile, Twitter is yet to officially comment about the reason for this but it does appear that the platform has performed a clean-up drive to get rid of bots and most likely inactive accounts.
The social media is known to perform such clean-up drives to keep accounts secure and also remove spam and bots. Earlier this year, Twitter carried out a similar exercise to clean the platform and had said, ""You may notice some follower count fluctuations from time to time. Accounts that we've asked to confirm their password or phone number aren't included in follower counts until they've confirmed that info. We do this regularly to help prevent spam and keep all accounts secure."
On a related note, Twitter said that it has removed more than 3,000 accounts which were operating as "foreign state-linked information operations". The Twitter accounts that were removed were linked to operations attributed to six countries, including Mexico, China and Russia, as per a report by Reuters.
Twitter has also announced that it will not allow users to share media files such as images or videos of private individuals without their consent. The company already banned media files that revealed sensitive information such as home address, identity documents, and contact information. However, the new rules aim to strictly crackdown on posts that could lead to harassment or invasion of their personal space. Interestingly, the new rules come just a day after the company announced Parag Agrawal as its new chief executive officer (CEO), following the exit of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
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