In November of 2018, Instagram announced that they would be taking measures to “reduce inauthentic activity” in the social network. What this meant is that they were going to start eliminating ‘likes’, comments, and fake followers, especially from accounts that were using third-party apps to artificially inflate their popularity.
Today, many social network users have found that their number of followers has significantly deflated. Some have lost up to 20,000 followers in one night, and there are extremely large accounts like some celebrities and media that have lost millions.
While some believe that it is about Instagram taking measures to eliminate inactive or false accounts, others report that it could be an error since the numbers of followers look different from different accounts for some users.
On Twitter, there are dozens of comments and reports about missing followers. The social media specialist, Matt Navarra, has been putting together a list of popular accounts that have lost followers throughout the day.
For example, Selena Gomez’s Instagram seems to have lost 2.3 million followers from one day to the next. Ariana Grande seems to have lost 3 million. The official account of Nike lost more than one million, and the Instagram of BBCNews, lost more than one hundred thousand.
After all the chaos caused by social networks, Instagram later decided to announce:
With this measure, Instagram adds to the cleanups that Facebook and Twitter already did during 2008 to avoid trolls, bots, and fake followers. Facebook, the owner of Instagram, is under heavy pressure after being informed that the information of some 50 million users ended up in the hands of the Cambridge Analytica consultant, who worked for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
