Elon Musk Says Your Twitter Follower Count Could Soon Drop — No, It's Not Another War On Bots

Elon Musk has announced that the number of followers on Twitter will soon drop for some users, but it’s not because of fake accounts and bots, but defunct ones. 

What Happened: On Monday, almost five months after Musk initially said the microblogging site would soon free the namespace of 1.5 billion accounts, the tech billionaire tweeted that Twitter is “purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years.”

He added that, in hindsight, users will probably see a drop in their followers count. 

See Also: We May Have Found Elon Musk’s Secret Twitter Account… And It’s Weird

John Carmack, former CTO of Oculus VR, who gave up his position at Meta Platforms Inc.’s META virtual reality unit, responded to his tweet saying that deleting inactive accounts of all their historic tweets would be a big mistake.

“Letting people know how many ‘active’ followers they have is good information, but deleting the output of inactive accounts would be terrible.”

The Twitter CEO replied to his post saying that these accounts will be “archived,” but it is important to “free up abandoned handles.”

Why It’s Important: Musk previously announced in December that Twitter would release 1.5 billion inactive usernames, but that plan was delayed, possibly because of users’ demand to preserve the accounts of deceased people. 

Meta’s Facebook memorializes accounts of deceased users upon receiving a valid request. Friends of the deceased can also request the removal of the account with appropriate documentation. 

Last year also Musk warned users that their followers count might drop, but that was because said the site waged war against spam and fraudulent accounts. 

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