TWITTER ANNOUNCES NEW DAILY FOLLOW LIMIT
Ife Adewole
In a bid to maintain the legitimate use of all twitter account, Twitter Head of Site Integrity Manager, Yoel Roth @yoyoel, has announced the management intention to change the numbers of accounts twitter users can follow in a day from 1,000 to 400.
Roth posted that, āToday, we lowered the limit on the number of accounts you can follow per day from 1,000 to 400. Some people are wondering why we picked 400. Well, Iām glad you asked. Nerdy thread on rate limits and anti-spam technologyā.
He explained that it is almost impossible to stop spam, bots or other types of manipulation with rate limits alone, but rate limits will allow each spam account less effective, slower and more expensive to operate.
āSo, 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 theyāre interested in each day while stopping the most spam.
āCertain types of inorganic follow behavior, like follow churning (repeated following and unfollowing the same account in the hopes of growing your followers), are prohibited in the Twitter Rules. So we looked for thresholds of follows per day from accounts that did this.
āWe found that nearly half of all accounts who made more than 400 follows per day were churning. That amounted to more than 20million follows each day, and a high rate of blocks and spam reports-a clear signal that inorganic follows are super annoying.
ā99.87% of Twitter users are totally unaffected by this lower rate limit. Most people donāt need or want to follow that many accounts. But some legitimate accounts, like business providing customer service by DM, actually do need it, and we want to avoid burdening them.
āEvery choice we make about our rules, limits, and spam-fighting systems has to work for hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of whom use Twitter in very different ways.
āImproving the health of Twitter is our top priority, and teams across the company are always working to refine these limits based on what we learn about spammer behavior and as malicious tactics evolveā, Roth Said.