It’s no surprise that people buys followers and likes on the social network, Instagram recently started an “Instagram Rapture”, whereby the Facebook-owned company deletes millions of fake accounts on its photo-sharing service, the result? Millions and millions of “followers” lost, resulting in many angry teens and celebrities.
Last week, a notification was sent to Instagram users telling them that they may see their follower count drop. The company then started removing millions of spam accounts in its network, which had popular Instagram users and celebrities seeing hundreds of thousands, and even millions less followers.
The celebrities were hit the hardest of course. Justin Bieber for example lost 3.5 million “fans” in the past 24 hours, while Akon went from 4.3 million to 1.9 million. Things became so heated up that Rapper Ma$3 even deleted his Instagram account after seeing his followers drop from 1.6 million followers to a mere 100,000 in just 20 minutes.
For an in-depth look into the loss, web developer Zach Allia has a very neat website that shows the aftermath of Instagram Rapture of the top 100 accounts on Instagram. The account that got affected the most is chiragchirag78, who lost 99.99% of its follower, going from over 3.6 million to only 8(!!) – the account has since been removed.
User accounts aren’t the only ones affected in this whole crackdown, ironically, the account that lost the most followers is Instagram itself, which lost a whopping 18 million followers in just 24 hours. However, Instagram’s loss isn’t entirely because it has fake followers, enraged users are so annoyed at this crackdown that they are all starting to unfollow Instagram – it won’t be surprised that a huge portion also deleted their accounts. Instagram had over 64 million followers yesterday and has about 45 million now.
Are you affected by Instagram Rapture?
(Source: BusinessInsider via: TheVerge)
