Twitter to remove suspicious accounts from users' followers

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Twitter announced on Wednesday that it would begin removing suspicious accounts it has locked from its counts of users' followers.

Twitter users are likely to see a reduction in their follower counts in the coming days. For many, this will amount to a reduction of four followers or less. But large accounts of celebrities and public figures could see bigger drops.

An account that's been locked can’t tweet, like or retweet posts, and it won’t be shown ads.

The company also noted that the move will not affect its number of monthly or daily active user figures. In the first three months of the year, it had 336 million active users.

Twitter has been working to remove fake accounts, bots and abusive posts from its service.

According to the Washington Post, the social media company had suspended more than 70 million fake accounts in May and June, leading to a decline of monthly active users in the second quarter.

"Most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted," Twitter’s CFO Ned Segal tweeted on Monday.

"If we removed 70M accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us," Segal added.

(Top image: VCG Photo)

Source(s): AP ,Reuters