One casualty of Twitter's campaign to make its platform "healthy": your follower count (and potentially, your ego).

Users of the social media platform can expect a reduction in followers from this week, after Twitter announced plans to begin removing tens of millions of accounts that have been locked for suspicious activity from people's follower counts.

This forms part of the company's effort "to build trust and encourage healthy conversation", Twitter's trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde said in a statement.

Profiles will experience varying impacts: the average user will see a drop of four or fewer followers, he claimed, while more popular accounts may take a bigger hit.

The Trump effect

Follower counts have become a proxy for status, so users may be less than thrilled by changes made to a competitive metric.

Tama Leaver, an associate professor in internet studies at Curtin University, predicted the move to delete locked accounts could prove upsetting for some users.

Nevertheless, he believes that concentrating on safety and transparency over growing its subscribers is an important step for Twitter.

"For the longest time, the only numbers that really mattered [to Twitter] were growth, because they didn't have that much of it," he said.

"If instinctively, when we're using Twitter, we think that things are reliable ... I think that means that we're more likely to invest in Twitter's original value, which was its immediacy."

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Like Facebook and Google, Twitter faced tough questions following the 2016 US presidential election over the spread of misinformation and the potential hijacking of its platform by foreign operatives.

In a series of tweets in March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted the company had not always proactively tackled bad actors on its platform and called for proposals to help it measure its "health".

In recent months, it has made a number of announcements aimed at cleaning up the site, including hiding "disruptive" tweets.

Twitter has also notified at least 1.4 million people who interacted with accounts potentially run by the Internet Research Agency — an online propaganda organisation linked to the Russian government, the company announced in January.

The locked account purge

Unlike a bot, locked accounts may have once been run by a real person.

But they are locked by Twitter if they start to behave strangely — tweeting hundreds of "unsolicited" replies or mentions, the platform explained, or tweeting "misleading" links, among other signs that could indicate an account has been hacked or compromised.

The owner of the account can have the profile unlocked if they confirm it with Twitter, and change their password. But now those accounts that have remained locked and unclaimed will be removed from people's follower counts.

Twitter is also fighting bots on the platform, and suspended more than 70 million accounts thought to be fake or suspicious in May and June, the Washington Post recently reported.

As the outlet noted, the removal of accounts generally raises questions about the number of active (human) users Twitter has.

In its financial results from quarter one of 2018, the company said it had 336 million monthly active users.

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On Twitter, the company's chief financial officer Ned Segal clarified on Monday that most accounts Twitter reviews are not included in its user metrics, as they "have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted".

Twitter said removing locked accounts from followers would not impact monthly active users, as locked accounts that have not reset their password for more than one month are excluded from these figures.

During an earnings call in April however, Mr Segal said initiatives cracking down on bad actors might impact its active subscriber numbers.

"We're always going to do the right thing to make sure that the service is great for those that should be on it and that's going to be removing spamming and suspicious accounts whenever we can and we continue to improve with that," he said.

Ultimately, Twitter users who see their followers drop will have the cold comfort of knowing those accounts that remain are now more likely to be flesh and blood.

"Twitter carving itself out as a space of authenticity is a good thing," Dr Leaver said.

"In the face of being synonymous with [Donald] Trump at the moment, this attempt to make it into a space where discourse, even debate, is at least between identifiably human actors rather than bots ... is a really important move."