twitter cleanup

so i’ve been on a 3 day twitter cleanup that was triggered by me finding out my account was being shown as a bot on this site i found called bot-o-meter

it has a search feature that you put whatever twitter account into and it shows you a best guess based on a bunch of behind-the-scenes heuristics which sucks because other people use this api as a data source in their tools

when i started this exercise i was following about 7400 accounts, so i had a lot of work ahead of me

i tried a lot of different tools, most of which try to charge you for access to details on fake followers, but finally found something free called follower wonk that takes a snapshot of both your followers and following and lets you view the data from a number of different angles

you need to do both a “follower” and a “following” report because it turns out you need to actively “remove follower” or “block” bot accounts to stop them from following you

the most useful for me was the “zero followers”, and “zero following” filters, followed by the “zero tweets” and “1-49 tweets” sections of both reports

these immediately shows any accounts are obviously bots or spam

The “recensies of tweets” also yielded good results, there were bots in all 5 differernt 1yr+ sections 

I trawled through the data from multiple angles and ended up pruning about 1800 following and about 300 followers

it got extremely zen-like at times, almost like i was pruning a weird kind of abstract bonsai tree. finding bots became addictive

the end result after like 3 days is now a waaaay more respectable 1.5 score on bot-o-meter

mission accomplished