so why does the article report that only 3.8 out of 3.9 million followers were restored? While overall I would say that is pretty much a rounding error, if we look at it very carefully you have to ask: did literally 100,000 people proactively choose to unsubscribe, from an account that obviously remains important, and moreover during a time when it was inactive? Would his tweet have been so 'spammy' that 1 out of 39 of his every follower decided on that basis alone to unsubscribe?

If the full number of followers were not restored, it raises the question of why not?

I don't know how to get historical "number of followers" information - as of this moment :

https://twitter.com/jack

the numbers I see are " 20.6K tweets, following: 2,2264, followers: 2.63M, likes: 15.1K, lists: 3"

for good measure and lest someone try to rewrite history here's a screenshot I just took: http://i.imgur.com/JJQKPI9.png

The figure CNN quotes is: "Soon after Dorsey was reinstated, his number of followers was showing up as only about 145 -- a steep drop from the roughly 3.9 million he had previously. The figure later popped back up to around 3.8 million."

So what exactly happened to cause 1.2M twitter followers to decide to unfollow him?

Sure, he's a heavy tweeter - I wouldn't follow him due to the level of spam - I mean who send 20,000 tweets in 7 years - that's 7+ per day at least.

but the people who did choose to follow him - if the CNN quote above is accurate - aren't people I would expect to unfollow him exactly around this time.

So if CNN's figure is accurate -- what happened? And why the drop of 1 million subscribers, or in other words one in three subscribers that he had had?