"Instagram Rapture" — Celebrities Embarrassed by Fake Followers

"Follower" and "Like" numbers are a point of bragging and display influence in social media. I can't even begin to count the number of emails and messages to our Facebook page from social media experts and companies promising likes/followers for money. Companies and apparently several celebrities (or their agents and record labels) occasionally enlist such services to help bolster their numbers. 

In a major crackdown dubbed "Instagram Rapture," millions of spambot or fake accounts were deleted that were inactive or broke terms of service. Doing so lead to an embarrassing drop in follower counts for many celebrities. The crackdown affected everyone's follower count mostly because the bots need to follow real people to mask what they are.

Among the top 100 accounts on Instagram, the average follower count dropped 7.6%, which shows just how bad the spam problem was. But there are a few notable outliers that dropped by a massive amount. The craziest drop was user chiragchirag78 that went from 3.6 million followers down to 8, yes just 8, which means 99.9998% of those followers were fake.

Celebrity accounts with the biggest drops: Akon (56.2%), Tyga / T-Raww (37.3%), Bruno Mars (23.8%), Sean Diddy Combs (22.4%), and Justin Bieber (14.8%). This means either the programmers of the spams bots love those celebrities or got paid to do so. Seeing as most of the biggest drops came from male accounts I think it's ego that helped push money toward getting higher follower numbers.

It should be noted that when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion dollars in 2012, that one-third of its users left or stopped using the service. I'm pretty sure Facebook is not worried because Instagram is now worth $35 billion.