If you’re a major Instagram user and check your follower count regularly, you may have noticed recently that your ‘Followers’ count has dropped significantly. No, your friends are not suddenly ditching you – it’s just that Instagram is cracking down on spam, and therefore they’ve done a massive delete of fake and inactive accounts. This will affect you most if you’ve had a lot of spam accounts following you, and it’ll also hit those people who’ve paid for followers.
According to Instagram:
“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 followers/following accounts.”
They started doing this earlier this year, but it’s an ongoing process and it seems like another major clean-up process has occurred this month.
Of course, this shouldn’t affect the average user too much, as the engagement from real, genuine should remain the same. However, if you’re obsessed with tracking the number of people who are following you, then you’ll probably be a little miffed. Like, this miffed:
