It's hard to deny the fact that Twitter is populated with accounts whose chief purpose is to flood the platform with spam content. To help address that issue, the micro-blogging site took a number of steps over the past couple of months including the introduction of the
ability to report fake accounts and the
suspension of more than 70 million fake accounts earlier last year.
One tactic that spammers use to achieve their goals on the platform is to follow multiple accounts and then unfollow those same accounts after they followed back. To control this behavior, Twitter is introducing a new limitation on how many accounts you can follow each day.
In a tweet, the company's support team says users can follow a maximum of 400 accounts per day as part of the new change. This represents a huge drop from the previous limit of 1,000 follows on a daily basis.
The new limit won't affect the number of accounts you can follow overall, though. Additionally, verified accounts can still follow up to 1,000 accounts per day.
In its
help center, Twitter makes it clear that abusive following is prohibited and violation thereof may lead to account suspension. This abusive behavior includes “follow churn”, or the act of following and then unfollowing several accounts in order the inflate the number of followers. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the new step taken by Twitter will help reduce the number of spam activities on the site.
