Pinterest is (finally) going after spam accounts with an axe

You may notice a drop in your Pinterest followers today. Don’t worry – your popularity level hasn’t fallen. It’s just the spammers and bots that Pinterest is targeting, so the “loss” of followers won’t really be a loss at all. In fact, Pinterest estimates that 99% of users will only lose around 10 followers.

It’s the bigger accounts that are going to be hit the hardest, but they won’t suffer at all in the engagement arena. Spam and bot accounts are the types that don’t really interact with you anyway so the drop is only going to sting a little in the pride department. For those who have purchased followers to inflate their popularity and egos, this might expose them a bit. Just like buying followers on Twitter or other social networks, buying them on Pinterest was never going to be sustainable.

According to Liz Gannes at AllThingsD:

All Pinterest users “will have just as many valid followers as today, but they will just lose a bunch of cruft,” Pinterest engineering lead Jon Jenkins said. More than 99 percent of accounts will lose fewer than 10 followers in the cleanse.

Check your followers now, then check again in a couple of days. Were you hit hard?

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“Computer Rage” image courtesy of Shutterstock.