Shaq and Ray Lewis both hit hard in massive social media purge
The “Twitter Purge” is underway, and it doesn’t discriminate about who it takes out.
We’ve learned that huge names, including presidents — both current and former — along with hall of fame athletes aren’t quite as popular as once thought.
Twitter is cleaning up its act, with the hope of eliminating fake followers.
“Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior,” said Twitter Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gadde. “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.”
The issue is purchasing followers to inflate one’s profile.
Companies like Devumi has allowed clients to simply buy Twitter followers in bulk.
The New York Times profiled Devumi in January, and highlighted Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis as someone who reportedly bought followers.
As a result, the former Ravens great’s profile lost about half of his followers.
Twitter completed its fake account purge today. One person who reportedly bought fake followers was Ray Lewis, who lost about half his followers pic.twitter.com/z8BNzECthv
— Austin Vitelli (@AustinVitelli) July 12, 2018
Not all of the people targeted by Twitter created their own list.
Shaquille O’Neal lost about 1 million followers, but still has about 14.6 million.
The Times article also focused on ESPN college football analyst Joey Galloway as someone who bought followers. The former NFL player went from 99k to 43.6k.
Former ESPN reporter-turned-politcal-analyst Britt McHenry was called out by the Times, and she lost around 140,000 followers.
Another was former ESPN employee Britt McHenry, who lost about 140,000 followers pic.twitter.com/GORSzkcD0r
— Austin Vitelli (@AustinVitelli) July 12, 2018
President Donald Trump took a hit, losing 300,000 followers so far, while former President Obama fell by 2 million.
There doesn’t appear to be evidence that either of them bought followers from Devumi or any similar sites.
At this point, nobody seems to know for sure if the “Twitter Purge” is complete, or if there will be more big names losing big numbers.
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