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Tech

13th Feb 2019

Here’s why you may have lost loads of Instagram followers overnight

Rudi Kinsella

instagram

Certain celebrities lost millions of followers in the past 24 hours.

A number of well-known influencers on Instagram are confused as to why they lost a substantial amount of followers on their social media account overnight.

This is because Instagram have deleted millions of accounts, which they believe to be inauthentic or “bots”.

A purge took place between Tuesday and Wednesday, which saw plenty of popular Instagram accounts lose thousands and even millions of followers.

Eagle-eyed Insta users noticed that Ariana Grande lost close to 3 million followers, while Selena Gomez lost almost 2 million.

In a blog post, the social media platform said that the process behind determining whether or not an account was inauthentic was relatively straightforwards:

“We’re taking a number of steps to limit this kind of unwelcome behaviour. Accounts we identify will receive an in-app message alerting them that we’ve removed the inauthentic activity given to their account from others. We will also ask them to secure their account by changing their password. Accounts that use these types of apps share their username and password, which is sometimes used to give inauthentic likes, follows and comments to others.”

Make-up artist James Charles is one of many people who has taken to Twitter since the purge to voice their confusion:

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