Trump, Obama see drop in followers after Twitter clean-up

US President Donald Trump lost about 100,000 of his 53.4 million followers, while his predecessor Barack Obama saw a significant drop of nearly 400,000 of his 104 million followers as Twitter began removing accounts locked by it for their suspicious activity, a media report said on Thursday.

The move of the microblogging site is a part of its efforts to sanitise its platform, rife with spam, trolling and other questionable practices, The Washington Post reported.

Twitter has 336 million users logging in monthly, but many of the frozen profiles were not active at least once a month.

The company said the move would affect about 6 per cent of follower counts across the service and the most popular accounts could experience a “significant drop” in followers over the next week.

Twitter’s Legal,

Policy, Trust and

Safety Lead Vijaya

Gadde acknowledged in a blog post that the move might disappoint some users, but it was necessary to regain trust.

“Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop... We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation,” the Indian-origin Twitter’s top lawyer said. The accounts being removed from follower counts could be locked for a variety of reasons, including tweeting a large volume of unsolicited replies or misleading links, the company said.