Twitter gets buggier: Followers don’t display, users restricted in error
Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)
Since the earliest days of Twitter, the easiest way to find out more about an account was to look beyond its tweets and dig deeper into who follows that account and who that account is following. Now, users are discovering that Twitter seems to either be glitching or intentionally limiting access to the complete lists of any given user's followers or who they are following.
Ars easily replicated the error by clicking on various accounts and finding that Twitter only showed a partial list of accounts a user follows or is following. For Twitter owner Elon Musk's account, for example, instead of seeing all 339 accounts he follows, Twitter only showed 64 accounts. Currently, it seems that users can only review complete lists of their own followers and following lists.
It's likely that Twitter is simply glitching, but it's possible that the company is planning to restrict who can view an account's followers and following lists, potentially reserving that privilege for paid subscribers someday. Earlier this month, the @TitterDaily account confirmed that the ability to direct message accounts that don't follow you would be restricted to paid Twitter subscribers.