After Congress leader Rahul Gandhi wrote to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal last month claiming that his follower count had started to drop, the social media company on Thursday said that the numbers are “meaningful and accurate”. Twitter’s spokesperson pointed to the company’s “zero-tolerance approach to platform manipulation and spam”.

“We fight spam and malicious automation strategically and at scale with machine learning tools, and as part of those consistent and ongoing efforts to ensure a healthy service and credible accounts, follower counts can and do fluctuate,” the Twitter spokesperson said.