Instagram Strikes Down Ghost Followers, Celebrities Lose Followers by Millions

Update: Instagram has acknowledged the bug via Twitter and apparently resolved the same.

Are you an Instagrammer? If yes, do spare a moment and check your followers count. Why you may ask? Well, Instagram seems to be on a cleansing drive and is perhaps deleting Ghost Followers and inactive accounts.

These lurkers could be real people or bots who follow active members but do not partake in liking, commenting, messaging and posting.

The Instagrammers or ‘Igers’ have posted online claiming the sudden decline in their follower count. “Mine dropped 500 followers,” one Instagram user said on Twitter today. The other one quoted that tweet to add “mine dropped almost 1000 followers.”

Famous Internet Personality, Celebrity Stylist and American Social Media Influencer said his account lost almost half a million followers.

And even bigger names like Selena Gomez’s and Don Benjamin’s follower count also dipped by millions, as per fans. We would be verifying the stats from our sources.

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And Many More

This new bug or update seems to have surfaced just hours ago and the Twitterati is flooded with agitated and confused users reporting the fall in their follower count.

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Recently, there have been reports on celebrity fan accounts being deleted on Insta.

The Photography Platform had posted an article titled, “Reducing Inauthentic Activity on Instagram.”

Recently, we’ve seen accounts use third-party apps to artificially grow their audience. Every day people come to Instagram to have real experiences, including genuine interactions. It is our responsibility to ensure these experiences aren’t disrupted by inauthentic activity. Starting today, we will begin removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity. We’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity. This type of behavior is bad for the community, and third-party apps that generate inauthentic likes follows and comments violate our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.

So far the Facebook Owned Social Media Juggernaut hasn’t officially commented on the recent developments.

If the online claims are true, then Instagram could be cleaning the purchased followers and scammers from the platform who ruin the overall experience of the real active users.