Twitter has reduced its limit on the number of people you can follow in one day in an effort to crack down on spammers.
The new limit, which is 400, is designed to prevent new accounts from following a large number of people and then removing them in a “bulk aggressive or indiscriminate manner.”
If you’re a long-time Twitter user, you will have almost certainly run into spam accounts. They’ll start following in the hope that you’ll follow them back, then they will fill your timeline with spam.
If you don’t follow back, they’ll stop following you and you will probably be targeted by another spam account later. This cycles continues until the spam account is finally blocked.
Twitter hopes to crack down on spam
The problem for Twitter is that it can be hard to recognize all those spam accounts. So in an effort to cut down on them, its limit on the number of people you can follow in one day has been slashed.
Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. Who does that? Spammers. So we’re changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400. Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 8, 2019
It was possible to follow up to 1,000 people per day. The new limit of 400 might sound pretty generous still — that’s a lot of people to follow in a 24-hour period. But Twitter says it will “make each spam account less effective, slower, and more expensive to operate.”
The 400 cap still gives genuine new users room to follow all the accounts they’re interested in without having to wait.
Most Twitter users won’t even notice
Twitter insists that the vast majority of its users (99.87%, to be more specific) won’t notice this change. Those who do will be able to follow more people after a day has passed.
Twitter also has a follow ratio limit that’s designed to curb spam. This prevents users from following too many people when they have a small number of followers themselves.
