Celebrities And Fakers Alike Lose Millions Of Instagram Followers As Spam Accounts Are Cleared
19 December 2014, 11:30 | Updated: 8 May 2017, 17:09

Did you survive the #Instapurge?
Instagram users are losing followers left right and centre, and not even the biggest stars of the site are safe.
After the #Instapurge removed an enormous number of accounts from its user base, in an effort to clear out spam followers, app user @zachallia compiled an interactive infographic on the top 100 follower drops.
The results are fascinating. As far as celebrities go, Real Madrid player James Rodriguez got off the lightest, as he shed only 54,000 accounts from his respectable 5.7 million-strong follower base. Beyoncé lost only 3% to spam (about 800,000). But some of the bigger losses include Rihanna, who lost around 1.2 million, Justin Bieber, who counted 15% of his followers as spam; and even Instagram themselves took one of the biggest hits, shedding 18 million followers - a whopping 29%.
But the most hilarious result has to go to deleted account "chiragchirag78" whose follower count dropped from an impressive 3,660,468... to 8.
There's not enough YIKES in the world to describe how bad this guy messed up. I hope this teaches us all a valuable lesson in buying followers.
Instagram announced the cleanup a week ago after celebrating the reach of 300 million users of the app. Wonder what that number has dropped to now?