As a $65 billion deal hinges on the amount of fake Twitter profiles on the platform, social media rival Instagram has been quietly purging tens of millions of bot accounts.
This has resulted in a number of the world’s top influencers shedding millions of followers in the past two weeks.
HypeAuditor, an AI analytics platform focused on influencer marketing, noticed that 13.5 per cent of all Instagram accounts saw a drop in followers between September 6 and 13, with celebrity accounts in particular being hit hard.
Both Kim and Khloe Kardashian lost 2.4 million ‘followers’ each, while sister Kyle Jenner lost 1.9 million. It appears to have hit across all segments, with soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo lost 1.6 million of his 476 million followers.
“The loss of followers should not be a cause for concern for influencers or the brands they work with – quite the opposite,” explains HypeAuditor CEO Alex Frolov.
“The massive loss of followers that stars like Cristiano Ronaldo or Kim Kardashian are currently experiencing does not mean that millions of fans are giving up their loyalty.
“Instead, we suspect the origin lies with Instagram itself. Such a purge of inactive or fraudulent accounts is nothing new. Other platforms such as Twitter or YouTube also run these from time to time to reduce the amount of inauthentic activity.
We estimate that only about 60 per cent of all Instagram accounts are real people. The rest are bots, inactive accounts or mass followers – and it’s highly unlikely that they are genuinely interested in shared content.
“So it only makes sense that Instagram should also remove mass accounts like these.”