Twitter has announced plans to reduce the number of accounts a user can follow in one day.
The capped amount has changed from 1,000 to 400 in a bid to tackle spam accounts.
Spam bots generally follow a large number of user accounts within a short period of time in the hopes that the users would follow the bot account back.
The bot would later unfollow the users in order to increase its follower to following ratio. Twitter calls this practice “churning” and lists it as a rule violation.
Running spam accounts had almost become a business, as tools have been made for accounts to automatically follow others, in the hope of boosting numbers.
Twitter announced the changed by post:
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
This latest change to Twitter follows the option of bookmarking tweets that was added in January.
To save a tweet for later, users can click on the menu icon and be given the option to bookmark.
Up until now, many Twitter users opted to use the ‘like’ button to save tweets for later, but CEO Jack Dorsey recently said the social network was planning to remove this button in a bid to improve the quality of debate.