Obama loses 2 million followers in Twitter crackdown on fake accounts



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Former President Barack Obama lost more than 2 million Twitter subscribers on Thursday as the social networking platform launched a new wave of crackdowns on fake accounts, according to preliminary analysis from the Daily Beast.

At the time of going to press, the Twitter purge had cost 2,346,119 followers to Obama, or more than 2% of his audience on the site. With over 101 million followers, Obama remains the third most followed person on the site, a few million followers behind the singers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber.

Other major political accounts were also affected by the purge, with President Trump losing 325,038 subscribers so far, a decline of 0.7%. As the first day of Twitter's purge ended, Trump had more than 53 million followers.

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it would begin to delete accounts that had been blocked because they were suspected of being hacked or used for spam. The accounts were already unable to publish on the site, but after their removal, they will no longer appear in the follower accounts, which are considered revealing influence or prestige on Twitter.

Twitter was intended to change this from Thursday, removing tens of millions of locked accounts. The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was himself affected by the change, tweeting that he had lost 200,000 followers in the purge.

Will Sommer and Kevin Poulsen.

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