Twitter's CEO lost 200,000 followers in a purge of accounts taken over by bots or spammers

Associated Press

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

• Twitter is removing inactive accounts that may have been taken over by spammers and bots. 
• This means a lot of people could lose followers. 
• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he lost 200,000 followers.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lost more followers than most people have on Thursday afternoon after his company started to purge inactive accounts.

Twitter announced recently that it planned to delete accounts that were created by users but may have been taken over by spammers and bots, or what Twitter calls "locked accounts."

Apparently, a lot of those accounts followed the CEO of Twitter. Dorsey said he lost 200,000 followers in a tweet.

For most people, they won't see a decrease like Dorsey. Twitter said that most users will see a drop of "four followers or fewer."

Twitter also said the purge won't affect the metrics it releases to investors, like monthly active users or daily active users. "Removing locked accounts from followers doesn't impact MAU or DAU," Twitter said in a blog post. "Locked accounts that have not reset their password in more than one month are not included in MAU or DAU."

Even though Dorsey lost a ton of followers, he still should get good engagement on his tweets. He's got over 4 million followers as of Thursday. 

Dorsey said earlier this year in an interview with Harrison Barnes that the change he'd make if he were starting Twitter today is to put less emphasis on follower count.