In what is being referred to as the Instagram “purge,” many Instagram users lost tons of followers when the picture-sharing platform cleared out inactive and spam accounts on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Poor Justin Bieber was dethroned as the most-followed Instagram user, losing 3.5 million followers in less than 24 hours, according to a list compiled by 64px.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, he had 23.8 million followers; after the purge, Biebs has a mere 20.3 million Instagram acolytes. Beliebers, we assume, rallied after learning of his fall from grace.<\/p>\n
The new ruler is Internet-breaker Kim Kardashian, of course. Kardashian lost only 1.3 million Instagram followers in the Purge, making her the new queen of Instagram followers with a 22.2 million follower count.<\/p>\n
Beyonc\u00e9, who lost fewer than 1 million followers, is now in the No. 2 spot. Akon lost more than 50% of his followers, dropping from 4.3 million to 1.9 million. After losing 1.5 million followers and dropping to 100,000, rapper Ma$e deleted his account.<\/p>\n
Instagram didn’t immediately respond to Mashable<\/em>‘s request for comment, but a spokesman explained the situation to The Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n After receiving feedback from members in the Instagram community, we recently fixed an issue that incorrectly included inactive accounts in follower\/following lists.<\/p>\n We believe this will provide a more authentic experience and genuinely reflect people who are actually engaging with each other\u2019s content.<\/p>\n We will always remember you, Instagram spam bots.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source:\u00a0mashable.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In what is being referred to as the Instagram “purge,” many Instagram users lost tons of followers when the picture-sharing platform cleared out inactive and spam accounts on Thursday. Poor Justin Bieber was dethroned as the most-followed Instagram user, losing 3.5 million followers in less than 24 hours, according to a list compiled by 64px. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":76077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-76076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-togbe-afede"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/76077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}