Shortly after celebrating the 300 million user mark, Instagram made an admirable move to clean up the photo-sharing social network by removing all the spam bots and fake accounts. This quickly backfired and got most of its users pretty upset when all those seemingly popular users lost millions of followers after the wipe-out.
A lot of celebrities lost a few millions of followers off their accounts, including 3.5 million from Justin Bieber’s account, 1.3 million from Kim Kardashian and about 1 million from Beyonce’s account. But, with millions of followers already in their accounts, they would hardly notice it. The users who bought off followers took the best beating.
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Some (used-to-be) popular Instagram accounts saw the biggest loses. Rapper Ma$e’s Instagram following was cut down to 100,000, losing 1.5 million followers. He immediately deleted the account after the embarrassment. And he was not the only one.
“We totally get that it’s uncomfortable for people,” said Gabriel Madway, Communications Manager at Instagram. “The overall goal is we want it to be perceived that the people following you are real.”
This move will bring down Instagram’s recently celebrated 300 million mark back by few million, but surely they will raise more followers in no time. It’s actually great to see a social network finally taking charge of cleaning up. I just hope more social networks would follow their footsteps and get rid of those annoying fake accounts.
[Via: NY Times / Mashable ]
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Follow @nrjperera – Roshan Jerad Perera
