Last week, Instagram made good on its promise to start “spring cleaning” its huge database of “followers”. By that, we mean that the social photo-sharing platform started purging inactive, fake, and spam accounts. The move was so drastic that it has since gotten users coining the term, “Instagram Rapture” to best describe it. If you’re on Instagram too, you’ve probably seen the warning 1/2 days prior to the “rapture”.
Like so:
A few people that we personally know lost a lot of followers, much to their dismay. We don’t blame them and it’s really nothing to laugh about because how would they have known that the accounts following them were fake/bots? Luckily, the original count of followers for these people were moderately low so the “loss” turned out to be actually..not so obvious.
Celebrities, or rather, celebrities on Instagram with the most followers, on the other hand, bore the brunt of it. For example, Justin Bieber’s “Belieber” count plummeted as he lost a total of 3.5 million followers. Wait, what? Did he have 3.5 million ghost “Belieber”s previously? And he’s not the only one!
Akon went from 4.3 million to 1.9 million in 24 hours, Ariana Grande’s follower count is also down by 1.5 million, while 1.3 million fake people decided that they couldn’t keep up with Kim Kardashian anymore.
Other Instagrammers such as Kendall and Kylie Jenner have lost hundreds of thousands of followers, and some celebrities have even taken the “Instagram Rapture” quite badly. For example, rapper Ma$e lost so many followers he decided to delete his account entirely. According to one Twitter user, Ma$e went from 1.6 million followers to 100k in a matter of 20 minutes. Nicki Minaj also took to Twitter to express her amusement over the purge.
She said:
Wait. IG gave me the followers of the girl that was impersonating me wen I created an IG. Now that I’m on they snatched dem shits bak. LMFAO
— NICKI MINAJ (@NICKIMINAJ) December 18, 2014
Of course, this only means that people are bewildered and unhappy. Some users have even taken to Instagram’s official, err, Instagram account, to post a barrage of insults and profanities. But what they might not know is that a lot of those fake accounts and spambots were actually deactivated a long time ago and Instagram is merely removing them for good now.
Also, let’s not forget that Instagram’s own Instagram account was not spared from this purge. According to our source, Instagram’s official account lost a whopping total of 18.8 million. Our own Instagram account, Hype Malaysia, lost only a handful but at least we now know who our real followers are. Our take? The clean up was something we all needed. Why have millions of followers and yet post statistics i.e. likes that don’t tally? Wouldn’t you want to have real followers only? Something for you to think about!
Meanwhile, here are top 25 celebrity Instagram followers losers:
Sources: @zachallia, engadget.
