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Today, we lowered the limit on the number of accounts you can follow per day from 1000 to 400. Some people are wondering why we picked 400. Well, I’m glad you asked. Nerdy thread on rate limits and anti-spam technology 👇...
First things first: You can’t stop spam, bots, or other types of manipulation with rate limits alone. However, rate limits *do* make each spam account less effective, slower, and more expensive to operate.
So, why 400 per day, and not 100? Or 58? Or 17? In short, we found that 400 is a reasonable limit that allows people to follow the accounts they’re interested in each day while stopping the most spam.
Certain types of inorganic follow behavior, like follow churning (repeatedly following and unfollowing the same account in the hopes of growing your followers), are prohibited in the Twitter Rules. So we looked for thresholds of follows per day from the accounts that did this.
We found that nearly half of all accounts who made more than 400 follows per day were churning. That amounted to more than 20 million follows each day, and a high rate of blocks and spam reports — a clear signal that inorganic follows are super annoying.
99.87% of Twitter users are totally unaffected by this lower rate limit. Most people don’t need or want to follow that many accounts.
But some legitimate accounts, like businesses providing customer service by DM, actually do need it, and we want to avoid burdening them.
But some legitimate accounts, like businesses providing customer service by DM, actually do need it, and we want to avoid burdening them.
Every choice we make about our rules, limits, and spam-fighting systems has to work for hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of whom use Twitter in very different ways.
Improving the health of Twitter is our top priority, and teams across the company are always working to refine these limits based on what we learn about spammer behavior and as malicious tactics evolve.
