Twitter vows to make itself less spammy with new policy change

Image: Burhaan Kinu / Hindustan Times / getty

Twitter knows it has a spam problem. 

The social media platform famous for Russian bots and harassment announced on April 8 that it has finally had it up to *here* with spammers and is going to take a small step to partially rectify the situation. That’s right, as of now you can only follow 400 accounts per day.  

“Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow,” Tweeted the Twitter Safety account. “Who does that? Spammers. So we’re changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400.”

The change goes into effect immediately, and is sure to roil the scores of accounts proudly proclaiming in their bios that they “follow back.” Truly, a solution breathtaking in its simplicity. Spam is solved. 

This move follows a related attempt to cut back follow-based spam — the idea that you can grow your follower count by rapidly following thousands of accounts with the hope that they then in turn follow you back — by Twitter earlier this year. In late January, the company cut three prominent social media companies’ API access with the understanding that the offered tools’ ability to rapidly follow and unfollow accounts was a spammy behavior. 

And while Twitter’s latest effort to reduce spam might bum out some, shall we say, gregarious users, it’s unlikely that the change will affect how regular people interact with the service — a point made, repeatedly, on Twitter. 

So keep hitting that follow button to your heart’s content, and know that if you ever for some crazy reason come across 400 discrete accounts that you want to follow in a single day you’re still good to go.