Instagram, today cleaned up its proverbial act and shut down spam and bots, which resulted in a lot of people losing a substantial portion of their followers. Justin Bieber, for instance lost nearly 15 percent of his followers. There is a long list of celebrities who saw their followers count go down — Zach Allia crunched some numbers and came up with a list! He found out that they lost roughly 671,000 followers or about 7.6 percent of the total.
Quite a few people are upset about the loss of their followers — I am not one of them. I welcome the early spring cleaning. It is refreshing to see a company maintain the basic values of a social platform: real human social connections and not promote fake follower counts. I want to know that people who have opted to follow me are real people and when they like something, they mean it! I would personally like to see other social platforms — Facebook and Twitter — too take a step in the right direction and clean up their act.