This week Twitter removed inactive and locked accounts from follower counts, and the third-most followed person on Twitter took a two-million person hit.
That person was former president Barack Obama, who boasted 104 million Twitter followers before the crackdown, but saw his number drop to roughly 101 million followers as of Thursday, according to The Hill.
Obama trails Katy Perry, who has roughly 107 million followers, and Justin Bieber, who has roughly 104 million. Obama is followed by Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Ellen Degeneres and Christiano Ronaldo. President Trump ranks 18th, with 53 million followers.
Twitter announced last week:
Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down. …
If we detect sudden changes in account behavior, we may lock the account and contact the owner to confirm they still have control of it. These sudden changes in account behavior could include Tweeting a large volume of unsolicited replies or mentions, Tweeting misleading links, or if a large number of accounts block the account after mentioning them. We sometimes lock an account if we see email and password combinations from other services posted online and believe that information could put the security of an account at risk — so we require accounts to change of their passwords for protection. Until we confirm that everything is ok with the account, we lock it, which makes them unable to Tweet or see ads.
In most cases, these accounts were created by real people but we cannot confirm that the original person who opened the account still has control and access to it.