Judgement Day came for millions of fake Instagram accounts this week in a crackdown so widespread it’s been dubbed the “Instagram Rapture.”
The mass drop in Instagram followers comes as the platform looks to rid itself of fake accounts, which some users purchase en masse to inflate their apparent follower count.
Instagram’s official profile took the biggest hit in followers, plummeting by 18.9 million accounts in a single day, according to data collected by Zach Allia, a web developer who created a handy graphic of the reckoning. Some of the most followed celebrities on Instagram took the next biggest hits. Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Beyonce lost a following of 3.5 million, 1.3 million and 831,000 respectively. The rapper Mase woke up to find his 1.6 million followers had dwindled to 100,000, prompting him to delete his account for good, Business Insider reports.
An Instagram spokesperson told the New York Times that the company’s recently publicized tally of 300 million active monthly users excluded the fake accounts now being purged.
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