Thread by @AlexandraErin

Theory: Twitter did one of their periodic bot purges that got *really* out of hand.

I've watched a good four different groups thinking they were being targeted for suspension because of specific activity and a wide swath of purely random users mentioning they had to pass a bot challenge to log in today.

When Twitter does a bot purge (and please do note that the term "bot" is imprecise for what accounts are targeted and why), accounts with large followings and a high visibility/value rating tend to lose a bunch of followers all at once.

That's because these accounts are the most valuable ones for bots to follow.

I would hazard that people who lost thousands of followers? At least some of those were probably fake accounts that followed in hopes of a followback for legitimacy,.

My supposition is rooted in the fact that I lost about 60 followers today with no discernible proximate cause (NB: I don't care about unfollows and periodically get weird after a follower spike specifically to shake loose people who won't be here for the entirety of my deal)

And I'm seeing people with accounts in a similar largeness range to mine who lost way more followers; it's not a contest, but I attract fewer fake followers than other accounts that are otherwise comparable in size to mine.

It's really not a contest; I'm a lower-value account.

I'm a lower value account because I confound algorithms. I have starkly limited interactions with my followers compared to most other people in my size range who tweet as often as I do.

So the fact that other people with tens of thousands of followers or more lost hundreds of followers or thousands of followers and I lost dozens... implies to me that while Twitter's purge went wider than they intended, it did mostly hit the intended targets.

Normally when this happens there is a huge freak-out among conservative and tinfoil hat Twitter, because the high-value accounts on that side of the aisle are REALLY high value to the bot-nets.

NB: When I say I'm a low-value account, this isn't self-deprecation. It's about visibility. My account's visibility functions differently than most people's because I use the platform differently, and no one's measuring for it.

Anyway. More people lost more followers than in previous bot purges, and a lot of actual accounts (and innocuous automated accounts) got locked or challenged, so I think the targeting parameters were off, and Twitter's statements imply they know this.

My guess is that they were trying to get ahead of some big, big misinformation push they caught wind of, something that made "causing days of headaches for customer support" the lesser of two evils.

TL;DR - just another case of Twitter Is Weird meets another case of Everything Is On Fire.