Instagram, owned by Meta, has initiated one of the largest digital 'cleanups' in recent years. Starting May 6, the platform began mass deletion of bots, inactive accounts, and artificially inflated followers.
As a result, millions of accounts worldwide saw a sharp decline in their follower counts. Internet users are even calling this event the 'Great Purge of 2026'.
According to reports, Instagram removed millions of 'dead souls' from the platform within a few hours. This process affected not only ordinary bloggers and business accounts but also the world's most famous celebrities.
One of the biggest losses was observed on Kylie Jenner's account. She lost approximately 14-15 million followers.
Cristiano Ronaldo's losses are estimated between 7-8 million and 18 million according to various sources. Despite this, the Portuguese superstar remains the most popular person on Instagram, with an audience estimated at around 666 million.
The official page of the famous K-pop group Blackpink also lost nearly 10 million followers.
In addition, a significant decrease in audience was observed for Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Lionel Messi, and many other global stars.
Experts believe that while ordinary accounts lost an average of 2-5% of their audience, this figure could be much higher for pages that used artificial 'boosting'.
Meta explains this process as an effort to increase the platform's 'authenticity'.
The company states that the main goals are as follows:
— clarifying statistics for advertisers;
— making algorithms fairer toward authentic content;
— getting rid of bot farms and fake audiences.
It is noted that Instagram has carried out similar 'cleanups' before. However, the scale of this process is one of the largest in the platform's entire history.
The 'cleanup' process is not yet fully complete. Therefore, numbers on many accounts may change again in the coming days.
Experts say this is an important signal for content creators: from now on, the main strength on Instagram will not be in artificial numbers, but in a real audience and quality content.
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