Twitter, in an effort to fight spammers, is reducing the amount of accounts users are able to follow everyday.
The original limit was 1,000 account follow per day, but from this point onward, the limit has been reduced to 400 a day.
Going from 1,000 follows to just 400 is quite a drop, but even then, 400 a day is still a good amount of accounts for the normal person to follow.
But of course, this change isn’t focused on the normal person. This is aimed towards spammers who are constantly following and unfollowing users en masse in an attempt to build their own following.
So why and how did Twitter choose 400? According to Yoel Roth, the company’s Head of Site Integrity:
“So, why 400 per day, and not 100? Or 58? Or 17? In short, we found that 400 is a reasonable limit that allows people to follow the accounts they’re interested in each day while stopping the most spam…
We found that nearly half of all accounts who made more than 400 follows per day were churning. That amounted to more than 20 million follows each day, and a high rate of blocks and spam reports — a clear signal that inorganic follows are super annoying.”
Yoel added that there are some legitimate accounts that actually do need a high follow count, such as businesses that provide customer service by DM.
It seems that 99.87% of Twitter users will even notice this change.