How Many Followers Did You Lose in Twitter’s Great Spam Purge?

If you’ve been noticing your Twitter follower count plummeting, don’t despair. They weren’t real tweeps anyway. It’s simply Twitter cracking down on random bots — including those pesky pornbots — and spam accounts that auto-follow people.

Twitter calls it ‘correcting’ follower and following counts. We call it the Great Twitter Spam Purge of 2009, because we like to make up mnemonic devices and clever names. If we could add a kitten logo, we would. In the meantime, from the Twitter blog comes this explanation:

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

The Purge is all the buzz on Twitter, with most tweeters waxing philosophical.

ResaMichelle: Twitter did a spam purge.. consequently, we all lost a lot of followers. I think it’s worth the loss…

amylizza: I see that after the spam purge, I’m back over 200 followers. Thank you so much to all my new followers & friends. I love you all!

eggboxrobin: Thank you for the updates re spam purge, I’m appreciating the deep-clean!

littlegingerkid: Just checked: I lost 42 followers in last week’s spam purge. I thought I was good at blocking the spammers. Maybe genuine ones went too?

Despite all this peaceful, no-petitions acceptance, there are people reporting losing all of their followers — and even some who claim there are more spammers now than before the Purge.

So what should you do about all this, if anything? Use common sense, tweeps.

Here are 5 TellTale Signs Your New Follow Might Be A Spammer:

• Deliberately sexy profile picture. While there are tweeps who simply can’t hide their smokin’ hot babe-ish-ness or Absolute hunkiness no matter what photo they use, the majority have no problem posting a G-rated icon.
• No profile info at all. Before you follow someone back, you need to know at least a modicum about who they are. It’s okay, if goofy, if under Location, they say: The Universe, The Earth, Everywhere. It’s also very okay if under Location, they list: Tehran. Many tweeps switched their location to mask genuinely Iran-based tweeters during the recent elections. We also colored our profile pix green in support.
• No followers, no updates, disproportionate follows-to-followers. Sometimes this a truly a newbie — like my friend @emacdaddy4 who just signed on to Twitter. I verified that it was actually my buddy by checking her Following list and noting a mutual friend.  This method can work — but if the spammer is particularly devious, they’ll pick up an entire list.  If it looks suspicious, ask her pal directly.
• Dubious updates. Are the updates legitimate conversation, Re-tweets from people you’ve heard of, links from reputable sources? An often dead giveaway is a page full of #FollowFriday recommendations, with no comments, just @ after @ after @. These spammers are trying to provoke mass follows via #FF.
• Auto-DM (Direct Message) with spammy sales content. I am not a fan of any bot-related activity on Twitter.

Those are just some basics. Feel free to tweet me @guruofnew if you have questions or run into a rogue tweeter.

And from savvy blogger Thoughtpick comes a very useful list of The Top 5 Methods & Apps to Reduce Twitter Spam.