If you feel like you just lost an excessive amount of followers on Instagram, you probably did.
First and foremost, if you haven’t heard of Instagram, it is a social network that allows you to share and edit photos. They have a large variety of filters and many different editing options including contrast and brightness levels. Additionally, users can hashtag the photos so that they are categorized and potentially seen by whoever wants to see them!
Since the photo-sharing app’s release in 2010, approximately 300 million users have joined. Unfortunately, many of these accounts have consisted of spam. Basically, people made mass amounts of accounts that had no legitimate value and are made in attempt to get either Instagram famous or to scam people into giving them their information.
Typically, these accounts gain many followers quickly and don’t remain active for very long. Instagram decided to clean up their network and remove all of the “spammy” accounts. This may seem like the end of the world, but it’s actually a very good thing.
Though the plummeting of users’ followers came as a shock, Instagram has been warning users of the deletion of accounts over the past week.
Celebrities suffered the worst of all. Justin Bieber lost 3,538,228 followers, Ariana Grande lost 1,529,206 and Kim Kardashian lost 1,300,963. Fascinatingly enough, even after the purge, Kim Kardashian has now been labeled the most-followed Instagram celebrity.
A huge problem with Internet fame over the years is spam, and it’s about time something was done about it. Social media is one of the most effective ways for consumers and businesses to communicate, as well as a great way for people to communicate with their friends or get their name out there for a specific skill. Unfortunately, not everyone use Instagram the way it was meant to be used, and those users had to suffer.
At least now Instagram will be spam-less and contain much more real content. Instagram has also made efforts to make their social network the best by eliminating specific hashtags. Next up: we hope it’s Snapchat!
Where were you during “The Great Instagram Purge of 2014”?