Pinterest is saying goodbye to spam with a site-wide purge of what they called “suspicious, fake or spammy accounts.”
The social network says that their spam team has been hard at work identifying the sources of spam on the site, and that work has led them to uncover some offending accounts. Starting today, those accounts are being flushed.
Besides helping to make the site cleaner, what does this mean for you?
Well, the bad news is that you may see a dip in your follower count. The good news is that it will most likely be insignificant. Here’s what Pinterest Engineering Manager Marty Weiner had to say about that:
“Removing these accounts helps protect the integrity of Pinterest and helps ensure that followers are real people who are interested in what you share. It also means some of these spam followers may be removed from your follower counts. For more than 99% of accounts, it will be a loss of less than 10 followers. However, spammers tend to focus their attacks, and most of the bad accounts are following a relatively small number of legitimate accounts.”
So you definitely won’t see some massive exodus of followers, unless your entire existence on Pinterest is propped up by spammers – which is highly unlikely.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a major social media site announce a site-wide spammer purge. Back in August, Facebook began a fall cleaning process that saw plenty of its top pages lose thousands of likes. Of course, these weren’t “real” likes, as they were perpetuated by fake accounts, duplicates, compromised spammers and the like. We’ll check back after Pinterest makes its purge to see just some many followers users lost. We don’t expect it to rival the situation with Facebook.
Back in October, Pinterest added user blocking and reporting features to the site – a move that no doubt aided the identification of spammers.