Thread by @AlexandraErin

I see a lot of people concerned that Twitter is unfollowing people for them en masse; I'm not convinced this is happening. It seems to be based on people's follower counts being down.

There are always "Oh, Twitter unfollowed you"s happening. Glitches somewhere.

*ducks* Honestly a lot of that is unnoticed user error, which is still down to Twitter's UI doing things like floating a pop-up unfollow button based on where your mouse is hovering.

But I have not noticed an uptick in chatter where Person A suddenly notices they are no longer following Person B, who they didn't ever deliberately unfollow.

Just people noticing their counts are low.

And the counts being low is something that can be explained purely by the high number of accounts that were locked today; the locked accounts aren't following anybody, while they're locked, and might take a few cycles to re-populate those connections after.

I'm honestly not trying to carry water for Twitter tonight; I just don't want people worrying about *one more thing* that doesn't seem to actually be happening.

If your follower count dropped by 2,000 all at once - that's probably 2,000 people who have to answer a challenge to get back into their account, not 2,000 people who have to
notice they lost you in their feed and hit the follow button.

I'm not saying it's impossible; there could be more than one thing happening and there usually is. It's just that I have seen upwards of a dozen "I think Twitter is unfollowing people because my listings are decimated" and not one "Here are people Twitter unfollowed me from".