Following last week’s announcement that the social network has hit 300 million active users, Instagram has begun its crackdown on fake, spammy accounts by removing them from the service.
However, this has meant that many users have seen a significant drop in their follower numbers as causing somewhat of an uproar.
For some, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing network’s purge has meant their follower count has dropped by hundreds, thousands or even millions in some cases.
Celebrities are seeing some huge cuts with Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber losing 1.3M and 3.5M followers, respectively. Instagram itself shed a massive 19M followers. It’s not just celebs and brands that are seeing steep declines, though. Regular people are also seeing a drop.
For one user, @chiragchirag78, Instagram’s actions meant he lost almost all of his followers as he went from ~3.6m to only 8 prompting him to delete his account. It’s likely that the followers were all fake, paid-for accounts used to boost perceived popularity.
You can see all of the accounts taking the biggest hits in this handy list created by @zachallia.
We’re in the process of fixing an issue that incorrectly includes inactive or fake accounts in follower/following lists. We want to maintain the best possible experience on Instagram, so we do our best to remove spam, fake accounts and other people and posts that don’t follow our Community Guidelines. As we remove these accounts, some people may notice a decrease in their follower/following counts.
Personally, I saw around a ~100 drop and I’m happy that any bots or spam accounts following me have been given the boot.
While some might be devastated at the loss of followers and a lower follower count, the change more accurately represents their following as the removed users were either spammy or fake accounts. Plus, the accounts removed had already been deactivated by Instagram and have now simply been deleted from the service altogether.
Have you seen a steep decrease in your follower count? Are you happy to see the service crack down on spammy accounts? Let us know in the comments below.
