Many were slain in the Great Instagram Purge of 2014. The photo-sharing app went on a cleaning spree Thursday, deleting inactive and spam accounts and causing people's follower stats to drop left and right.
It seems like celebrity accounts suffered the most. Web developer Zach Allia has put together a nifty infographic showing the carnage among Instagram’s 100 most popular accounts. By Allia’s numbers, Justin Bieber lost more than 3.5 million of his 23 million followers in the purge, while Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million of her 23 million followers and Beyoncé lost more than 800,000 of her 22 million. A moment of silence, please.
Thursday's cull didn't just happen out of the blue. For the past week, Instagram has displayed a little notice letting users know it would be deleting these types of accounts. But people were still shocked and appalled to see their numbers plummet.
For what it's worth, nobody is losing real followers -- only robots and dead accounts. There was at least one other episode of this in April, when Instagram began cleaning out bogus accounts, so not everyone will be affected this time around.
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