Twitter lowers daily follow limit from 1,000 to 400 to combat spam bots

For better or worse, Twitter has helped start revolutions and elect a president. But its immediacy, brevity, plus the anonymity it makes possible, have turned it into a living hell for some of its users. (Mohamed Ahmed Soliman/Dreamstime/TNS)

Twitter has announced via its Twitter Safety account that it is trying to hinder spam bots by lowering the daily follow limit from 1,000 to 400.

Spam bots generally follow a large number of user accounts within a short period of time in the hopes that the users would follow the bot account back. The bot would later unfollow the users in order to increase its follower to following ratio. Twitter calls this practice "churning" and lists it as a rule violation.