Hillsdale College’s social media accounts were unaffected by the latest Twitter purge that affected many conservatives on social media.
Social media manager Gianna Green said in an email that to her knowledge, “none of the accounts associated with the College were affected.”
Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump from its social media platform stating “the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” After the ban, several prominent conservative commentators on Twitter noticed they were losing massive amounts of followers. One user reported that he lost 30,000 followers in the course of four hours.
Actor James Woods claimed Twitter “deleted 15,000 followers” from his account, while Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton said he lost 11,000.
“Dang @jack this is a heck of a haircut of followers I’m getting. Lots of folks complaining as the purge seems vindictive and politically motivated,” Fox Business host Charles Payne tweeted.
Often referred to as a “Twitter purge,” which is when presumably robots and fake accounts are expunged from the platform, a Twitter spokesperson said the company regularly locks accounts due to spam policies, the Washington Examiner reported.
“As part of our work to protect the integrity of the conversation on Twitter, we regularly challenge accounts to confirm account details such as email and phone number,” Twitter said in a statement to the Examiner. “Until the accounts confirm additional account information, they are in a locked state and do not count towards follower counts.”
Hillsdale College, however, can safely say it avoided the purge this time around.
“I have noticed a decrease in our followers over the past few weeks, but this usually happens to bigger brands when Twitter purges their site, which happens fairly regularly,” Green said.
Director of Digital Marketing Ric Tombelli reaffirmed that none of the Hillsdale College accounts or accounts directly associated with the college were affected. Tombelli pointed out that social media companies regularly clean out their system, with Twitter being especially prone to bot accounts.
Tombelli said he did not believe that any major accounts were affected, or that the loss of followers speaks to a purge-like action by Twitter.
“There’s no trend,” he said. “There’s just fewer followers.”
