After Instagram made good on its promise to remove scores of spam accounts from its service, many users noticed that they lost large swathes of followers — from a handful to a few million. Saddeningly, many users are having trouble dealing with the loss and are in a row over the issue.
The Verge reports that Instagram said it would remove accounts that didn’t fall in line with its Community Guidelines, which includes refraining from spamming users in comments. Users were notified that they might notice drops in their follower counts, but it’s apparent from comments made on Instagram’s own submissions that folks are none too happy about it.
The crackdown has resulted in major drops in follower counts for users like Justin Bieber, Akon, Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian, who have lost over a million followers each. The biggest loser? Instagram itself. The service’s own account has lost a staggering 18 million followers.
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Developer Zach Allia put together the above graph to make sense of the biggest losses. What he can’t chart is all the sorrow troubled users are going through from taking such a hit.
➤ Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots [The Verge]
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