If you are a regular Twitter user with a large quantity of followers, you should have noticed a drop in your ‘Following’ and ‘Follower’ counts. Twitter today announced that it will purge Spam accounts and correct data inconsistencies. So far, you should’ve been noticing an incorrect value in the ‘Followers’ and ‘Following’ counts, and this issue will be solved now, meaning, you’ll be shown an exact value.

Users who have a large quantity of followers will notice a good drop in their follower-count if they do have spam followers. Also, if the person you follow is a spammer, obviously your ‘following’ count will drop as well. Twitter says this on its status page,

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.

There wasn’t any change in my ‘Followers’ count. Guess all my followers are true users ;) You can also follow me here.