Just in time for the holidays, online time-waster Instagram cleansed itself of several million fake followers. The photo-sharing service warned all of its “users” they were going to delete fake accounts and low-n-behold they actually did. The inevitable whining from the entitled generation ensured as their follower’s nee spambots were deleted one by one.
The moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth that was coming for LA-LA land and its faux-lebrites whose “followers” disappeared overnight. According to the site 64px.com (bravo sir!), the top biggest loser was Instagram itself which lost nearly 19 million fake followers. The biggest faux-lebrity losers (and click-bait) in the #InstagramRapture according to the site are:
| Rank | Account | Users disappeared | % Users disappeared |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 18,880,211 | 29.44 | |
| 2 | justinbieber | 3,538,228 | 14.86 |
| 3 | arianagrande | 1,529,206 | 7.03% |
| 4 | kimkardashian | 1,300,963 | 5.53 |
| 5 | selenagomez | 1,116,032 | 5.70% |
| 6 | kendalljenner | 906,897 | 5.32% |
| 7 | kyliejenner | 826,529 | 5.28% |
| 8 | beyonce | 831,971 | 3.75 |
| 9 | khloekardashian | 748,269 | 4.70% |
| 10 | taylorswift | 725,379 | 4.39% |
| 11 | mileycyrus | 711,898 | 5.03 |
| 12 | snookinic | 378,116 | 7.2838% |
Not only the denizens of LA-LA Land that were impacted by the Instagram purge, but several businesses also lost large numbers of bogus fans. Besides Instagram the biggest business loser include:
- natgeo lost nearly 289,000 followers
- nike lost over a quarter of a million
spambotsfollowers - forever21 lost 245,210 followers
- nba account lost 195,531 fake fans and
- louisvitton lost 106,740 bogus followers
rb-
I wrote about another social media “issue” when Cisco was reportedly buying followers on Twitter. Maybe Cisco has been selling its followers to the tweenies on Instagram.
We can hope that the #temperature teaches the entitled generation that life is not fair, especially when your friends are spambots. Go outside, talk to people, learn a programming language, stop supporting reality TV and porn actors.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.