Twitter fights spam with new daily follow limits

Twitter is imposing new limits on users of its platform, albeit one that should affect almost no legitimate user. Going forward, the platform is limiting the number of users one can follow in a day from 1000 to 400.

Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, explained the decision on Monday, saying:

Certain types of inorganic follow behaviour, 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.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping follow churners from hitting the limit each and every day. It’s just going to be more work for them and a little less frictionless.
Twitter’s new daily follow limits are live now, and if you find yourself hitting them — perhaps you may want to consider going outside.