Twitter saw mass “organic” deactivations and huge fluctuations in follower numbers for some of the platform’s highest-profile users after Elon Musk agreed to a $44 billion takeover deal of the social media giant.
According to an NBC News report published Tuesday, the follower numbers for some of Twitter’s most-followed accounts, including former President Barack Obama and singer Katy Perry, all dropped by hundreds of thousands. Obama, who is Twitter’s most-followed user with 131.7 million followers, saw his follower count fall by 300,000 since Monday, NBC News says. Perry, who has 108.8 million followers, lost 200,000, according to NBC News.
Twitter routinely purges the platform of bots and fake accounts, which can lead to follower counts dropping, but the company told NBC News that the recent drops were “organic” and not automated or the deletion of bots, meaning the changes are coming from “account creation and deactivation.”
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“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation,” Twitter said in a statement to NBC News.
Conversely, the follower numbers for prominent right-wing politicians and personalities have seen huge upticks in the days since the Musk takeover news broke. NBC News reports that controversial GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene saw her follower count jump 100,000, and far-right Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro gained 90,000 followers since Monday.
The deactivations come as Twitter users worry that Musk’s maximalist approach to free speech will lead to changes in content moderation on the platform and less stringent policies on abuse and extremist rhetoric and the return of banned users.
“My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all,” Musk said at the TED conference in Vancouver on April 14.
