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Instagram carried out a massive purge of bot and inactive accounts this Thursday, leading to drastic drops in follower counts for celebrities, influencers, and brands worldwide, an event users have dubbed the “Great Purge of 2026”.
A spokesperson for Meta confirmed that the action is part of the company's standard process. "As part of our routine process for removing inactive accounts, some Instagram accounts may have noticed updates in their follower counts," they indicated.
"Active followers are not affected, and any suspended account that is restored will be re-added to the count after verification," the company added.
Among the most affected are Kylie Jenner, who lost over 14 million followers, and Cristiano Ronaldo, with 6,622,220 followers removed, according to reports from specialized media.
The K-pop band BTS and Bollywood stars Virat Kohli and Priyanka Chopra are also among those affected, with losses of millions of followers in a matter of hours.
Even the official Instagram account was not spared: according to a user on X cited by specialized media, the platform reportedly lost nearly nine million of its own followers, which sparked a wave of jokes on social media.
Meta did not provide an exact number of accounts deleted, but the company estimates that between 10% and 15% of its active accounts are fake or spam. By 2025, Instagram had already deleted more than 500 million false accounts, according to its Transparency Report from February 2026.
The operation by Instagram is not an isolated event. X conducted its own bot purge on April 9, just a month earlier, suspending 208 bot accounts per minute according to Nikita Bier, the platform's Product Director.
Bier celebrated the action with humor: "Christmas came early," he wrote when announcing the massive suspensions. According to socialmediatoday.com, by October 2025, X had already removed 1.7 million bots dedicated to spam in a previous purge.
Both operations reflect a growing trend among major platforms to eliminate artificially inflated metrics, in response to pressure from advertisers and regulators demanding more transparent and accurate audience data.
The economy of fake followers generates millions: services like Buzzoid or Famoid charge between $50 and $100 for 10,000 followers, 95% of whom are bots that vanish within weeks, according to an analysis by the Federal Trade Commission of the United States published in November 2025.
The Instagram purge comes at a time when the authenticity of digital metrics has become a central demand of the global advertising ecosystem, and all indications are that platforms will continue these cleaning operations periodically.
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