Pinterest on Thursday began a cleansing of spammy and fake accounts. It plans to delete them. The site already has a spam reporting system for pins and comments. It tries to take care of bad behavior — like posting a picture of some cool product that redirects to a weight-loss site instead — on a rolling basis. But it saved up a big batch of infringing accounts to wipe out in one fell swoop, in part because some users’ follower counts may drop significantly. Pinterest engineering lead Jon Jenkins noted that larger follower drops will likely only happen to a small minority of accounts that are on popular user lists or have bought fake followers. All Pinterest users “will have just as many valid followers as today, but they will just lose a bunch of cruft,” Jenkins said. More than 99 percent of accounts will lose fewer than 10 followers in the cleanse.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.