Instagram has begun mass removal of fake, inactive, and suspicious accounts, causing the largest global stars to lose millions of followers in just a few days.
Kylie Jenner, Cristiano Ronaldo, and other stars have lost millions of followers on Instagram.
The social network has reduced the audience of the largest accounts on the platform.
Instagram has begun one of the largest purges of fake and inactive accounts in recent years. The mass removal of bots and suspicious profiles has already been dubbed the great cleanup of 2026 on social media. Both global celebrities and ordinary bloggers have been affected.
Users around the world noticed a sharp drop in follower counts on May 6. The losses were particularly significant for accounts with millions of followers. As noted by Baza, Kylie Jenner lost about 15 million followers, Cristiano Ronaldo over 10 million, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande each lost around six million followers, while Taylor Swift lost about four to five million. The audience reduction also affected BLACKPINK, BTS, Lionel Messi, and Justin Bieber.
Instagram has updated its system for detecting inauthentic activity. New algorithms have started to aggressively remove bots, purchased followers, "dead" accounts, and profiles with suspicious behavior. This concerns not only artificial inflation but also long-abandoned pages with no activity.
There has been no official statement from Meta yet, but the discussion of the cleanup has already gone far beyond Instagram. Threads users are mass-posting screenshots of their declining statistics and debating the actual scale of the artificial audience among celebrities and influencers.
The drop in follower counts has also affected smaller accounts. Many creators reported losing anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of followers. On average, users estimate that bloggers lost between 2 to 5% of their audience.
According to experts, this is not about a mass exodus of real users, but rather a large-scale adjustment of statistics. The new wave of fighting bots and inflation may make popularity and engagement metrics on social media more transparent and closer to the real audience.
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