Followers Count doesn't add up with the actual followers

[Chris Prakoso]

Hi all,
I am new with Twitter API Dev, so apologise if my question seems
silly.

I have a user that has followers_count = 6000+
But when I try to collect the user data of those followers by paging
through the statuses/followers API, at the end of the pages (where no
more items are returned back), I get only about 5800-ish users. Where
are the other 200 go ?

Am I missing something here ?

Thanks for your help,
Chris

[Matt Sanford]

Hi Chris,

Welcome to the group! Take a look at the current list of issues
[1] … there are a few there related to this problem. Mark one of those
with a star (click on the star next to the issue number) and you'll
get updates when we make changes.

Thanks;
– Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
Twitter Dev

[1] - http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list

[Chris Prakoso]

Thanks Matt for pointing to the right place.

Hope that this issue can be resolved quickly, because the alternative
of hitting the individual user for all followers would be a disaster.

Chris

On Jul 2, 3:27 pm, Matt Sanford <m...@twitter.com> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
>      Welcome to the group! Take a look at the current list of issues  
> [1] … there are a few there related to this problem. Mark one of those  
> with a star (click on the star next to the issue number) and you'll  
> get updates when we make changes.
>
> Thanks;
>   – Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
>       Twitter Dev
>

> [1] -http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list

[Tim]

> Where
> are the other 200 go ?

To answer your questions, chances are that these 200 accounts have
been disabled (probably for being spam accounts), but I noticed there
are still counted in the number of followers.

Tim

[Howard Siegel]

Others have also noticed that some accounts show up multiple times in the list of followers when retrieved via the API.  Not sure why that happens, but it does.

- h

[Chris Prakoso]

I can confirm this now.  I just pulled the remaining followers that were not in the paged follower-list, but exist in the social-graph.
So far all of them are suspended account.

I guess with the paged list, the API only brings back the ones that are active.

Chris