Pinterest announced Thursday they were cleaning up spam accounts with a new spam team and the results have been very evident. Several major brands have seen their followings drop by the hundreds of thousands.
Mashable reported that Harper’s Bazaar had 4.9 million followers and Nordstrom had 3.6 million followers Friday morning. In a matter of hours, Harper’s Bazaar lost around 200,000 followers and Nordstrom lost around 300,000 followers.
Joy Cho who ranked number one on the top 10 Pinterest users list, has lost almost three million followers which brings her total down to just under 10 million. A spokesperson from the social network provided this statement:
“That magnitude of change is rare, but there were definitely cases like that. We understand this might be jarring for some people, which is why we were proactive and emailed account holders who would have a big number change before we actually removed the accounts. We told them how much their follower account would change, explained what was happening and offered to answer questions.”
Pinterest uses an algorithm to detect spam accounts through a scoring system. Accounts have a score anywhere between 1 and 100 with a higher score being worse. Those with a higher number have their account disabled and medium score accounts don’t have their content appear as often in search.
These protections are put in place to keep the social network running smoothly and with new efforts being put in place, this likely won’t be the end of Pinterest users losing even more followers.
