Get ready to lose all your Twitter followers

Twitter have been trying to sort out and fix "locked" accounts (flagged accounts that have been reported for spam, indecency or being fake), and will now not be including them in users' total follower counts.

So basically that spam account that follows you, won't be showing up that they follow you anymore.

Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety lead, has said that we're looking at losing roughly four followers if you have an average account, but looking more into the thousands for high-profile accounts. 

Twitter's employees have said that this was always something they were working toward, to better the security of Twitter as a whole, even if people won't be happy about losing their followers.

"Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate," Gadde explained. "Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behaviour. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts, and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down."

If you've lost followers already, then you've probably already had the dreaded spam sweep happen, but if you haven't, Gadde says you can expect it within the next week.

"We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation," she said. "Though the most significant changes are happening in the next few days, follower counts may continue to change more regularly as part of our ongoing work to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts." 

Four followers isn't too much, we suppose, but we better get hashtagging again!