Several branded media accounts and celebrities took a major hit on Twitter this week.
News organizations across the political spectrum lost swaths of accounts, according to data compiled by the third-party social media tracker CrowdTangle.
The New York Times, for example, had a net loss of more than 180,000 followers. During the same time frame, Fox News lost 60,000. CNN lost 193,000.
More than 30 national news organizations and political blogs showed a net loss of followers this week, an abnormal trend.
The drop in Twitter reach wasn’t contained to only media. Singer Katy Perry, who is followed by more than 100 million accounts, lost more than 3 million Twitter followers.
In recent months, a number of conservatives, including lawmakers, have alleged Twitter had been “shadow banning” them — limiting or blocking the visibility of their posts, which the company has denied.
On Friday, a Twitter spokesman said follower counts may continue to change more regularly as part of the company’s ongoing work to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts.
“As part of this work, we discovered a bug where some of these accounts were added back which led to misleading follower counts,” the company said in a statement. “We’re now working to ensure everyone’s follower counts are back to normal. This issue affected very few accounts.”
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