We announced that Twitter is excluding 'locked accounts' from followers, and there is also the possibility that there are accounts where the followers are greatly reduced

Twitter 's reliability has been a problem for some time, such as showing research results that up to 48 million accounts of Twitter users are bots . For this reason, Twitter regulates automatic posting bots after entering 2018. And, Twitter newly announced that December 12, 2018 (Thursday) local time to delete "suspicious account" from the number of followers. It is thought that users who have many "fake followers" due to this effort will decrease the number of followers.

Efforts to increase the reliability of followers
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/Confidence-in-Follower-Counts.html

Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/technology/twitter-fake-followers.html

Twitter on July 11, 2018, "We believe that the number of followers should be important and accurate, we are advancing to eliminate locked accounts from the number of followers." Post content.

We are committed to building trust and encouraging healthy conversation on Twitter.

Follower counts should be meaningful and accurate. We are removing locked accounts from follower counts.

- Twitter (@ Twitter) July 11, 2018

"We will lock the account when there is a sudden change in the user's behavior and contact the owner of the account and wait until the user confirms the account and reset the password, I will keep on locking. "

What are locked accounts?

When we see sudden changes in behavior, we lock accounts. We are out of the owners of the accounts and unless they have validates the accounts and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in.

- Twitter (@ Twitter) July 11, 2018

"Although most people think that the number of followers is less than four people, some people may noticeably decrease their followers."

What does this mean for your follower count?

Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts may experience a more significant drop.

Read more. Https://t.co/BNPFKU7iME

- Twitter (@ Twitter) July 11, 2018

"Locked account" is different from bot. A bot is an account for spam purposes, created to artificially disseminate or exaggerate certain content. On the other hand, "locked account" is an account created by a person, but it is judged that there is no evidence of long-term activity or there is a risk of being taken over, and an account that Twitter is asked to confirm It corresponds to. Twitter does not disclose the exact number of users affected by this process, but it is expected to be tens of millions of accounts. It is estimated that a total of about 6% of followers will be reduced in total.

Although this treatment affects the number of followers, since it is impossible to retweet the originally locked account "Like", it does not affect their number. Also, since Twitter has not counted the number of active users per month and day published by Twitter from the beginning, it does not affect them either.

Twitter has continued efforts to increase reliability, and since February 2018 regulated the auto-posting bot, there were also users who significantly reduced the followers. Also, in May, I announced that I locked 10 million accounts per week "suspicious account".

Even hacking and other hijacking and locked accounts have been included in the number of followers so far, this change will make it more accurate to show the number of users in your account. About Twitter's decision Unilever's chief marketing officer Keith Weed said: "If the activities of bots are small and people know that people are active, people will place more confidence in Twitter and read posts I think that it will become. "