So I did a slightly pathetic thing this week: I refreshed my own Twitter follower count about six times in one afternoon, waiting to see if it would drop. It didn't move an inch, which honestly says more about how few of my followers were ever bots to begin with than anything else.
This is because of the whole "Twitter purge" thing that's been all over my feed since Wednesday. Short version, in case you've been offline: Twitter's been locking accounts it thinks are fake, hacked, or automated, and doing it at a scale big enough that you can actually watch follower counts fall in real time on the big accounts. Katy Perry reportedly dropped something like 2.5 million followers. Obama lost a couple million. Bieber too. These aren't small dents, and the drops started showing up publicly around July 11th once people noticed the numbers moving and started screenshotting before-and-afters.
Twitter's line is that this isn't new, exactly, just newly visible. They've apparently been locking suspicious accounts since May, and one number going around is something like 70 million accounts locked across May and June alone, before this week's more public wave. The locked accounts still exist, they just don't count toward anyone's follower total until (unless) the real owner verifies theyre a real person. Which, fine, that's a reasonable definition of "locked."
Here's my actual opinion on this, since I have one: it's overdue and I'm glad they're doing it, but I don't think anyone should get a pat on the back for finally admitting the numbers were fake. Every platform that sells "engagement" and "reach" to advertisers has had a pretty strong financial incentive not to look too hard at this for years. Twitter's stock dipped on the news, which tells you the market understood exactly what was happening even if nobody wanted to say it out loud: a meaningful chunk of the platform's "users" were never going to click on an ad, because they were never going to click on anything.
I run a tiny local tech meetup account (not this blog, a different one, don't ask) and it lost four followers this week. Four! I felt an actual flicker of relief, like, oh good, it wasn't just my imagination that engagement's been quieter lately, some of those "people" were never real. Then I felt a little dumb for caring about four followers on an account with nine hundred of them. Vanity metrics get you even when you know better.
Anyway, not everything this week was about fake accounts. Microsoft put out the Surface Go on Tuesday, the small cheap one, starting at $399 for the base model without the keyboard (which is its own annoying story, they never learn). It's clearly aimed at the iPad and Chromebook crowd rather than people who'd buy a real Surface Pro, and I think that's smart, honestly. Not every device needs to be the flagship. Sometimes a smaller, dumber, cheaper thing is exactly the gap in the lineup that needed filling.
And obviously I can't write a July post without mentioning the World Cup, even briefly. England went out to Croatia in extra time on Wednesday and the whole "it's coming home" bit that had taken over every timeline for two weeks just sort of evaporated overnight. I don't follow football closely but even I noticed how fast the mood online flipped from delirious to deflated. Funny how a single extra-time goal can do more to a platform's mood than any algorithm change.
Back to the bots for a second, because it's the thing that'll stick with me longest out of this week's news. I keep thinking about how many small accounts, small blogs, small newsletters, spent years being told their numbers were low because they weren't doing enough, weren't posting at the right time, weren't hustling hard enough, when some of what they were actually competing against wasn't real at all. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's just arithmetic once the fake accounts get subtracted. I don't have a neat lesson to pull out of that. It just makes the whole exercise of comparing yourself to other accounts' numbers feel even more pointless than I already thought it was, and I already thought it was pretty pointless.
I'm going to go check my follower count one more time before bed. I already know it hasn't changed. I'm checking anyway.