Instagram got rid of fake accounts, and they were not by the mere hundreds. IG expected to make its followers happy because of this move, but that is not how Instagrammers are feeling right now.
The incident, dubbed by netizens as "Instagram rapture" deleted millions of accounts overnight. Justin Bieber, who used to be most followed person on IG, just got dethroned , and lost 3,538,228 flollowers out of 23 million; Beyonce, 800 thousand out of 22 million; and Kim K, 1.3 million out of 23 million fans on Instagram. Rapper Akon on one hand is down by 56% on IG fan count.
But apparently, the biggest loser on Instagram is Instagram itself. IG lost a total of 18,880,211 followers after its rapture.
The great IG purge did not just anger fake IG account owners, but legitimate ones as well.
Shortly after the photo-sharing social media site reached 300 million users, IG announced they will be removing fake accounts shortly. And by this, they meant every single account that does not have a real person behind it.
Instagram has made an announcement about a week ago that users might see a decrease in their follower count following the clean up:
"We're in the process of fixing an issue that incorrectly includes inactive or fake accounts in follower/following lists. We want to maintain the best possible experience on Instagram, so we do our best to remove spam, fake accounts and other people and posts that don't follow our Community Guidelines. As we remove these accounts, some people may notice a decrease in their follower/following counts," IG explained in an announcement posted on their site.
Inline with this, the highly popular social media site has also announced that there will be some changes in their privacy policy.
According to Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, IG from the very start was designed to "become a business." IG's goal in updating their privacy policy is for it to be able to experiment on innovative advertising.
Systrom adds that this does not mean users' photos will be sold to third party users. He also clarified that it is not Instagram's intention and their team is trying to make this more clear for users.
