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While Instagram's "Great Purge of 2026" left dozens of influencers with thousands fewer followers, several Cuban content creators achieved what few expected: ending the day with more followers than before.
This Thursday, Meta carried out a massive cleanup of bots and inactive accounts on Instagram that shook profile counts worldwide for about six hours.
The magnitude was global: Kylie Jenner lost over 14 million followers, Cristiano Ronaldo saw 6,622,220 disappear, and even the official Instagram account lost nearly nine million.
A spokesperson for Meta described it as "part of our routine process for removing inactive accounts" and clarified that "active followers are not affected."
Among the most followed Cuban influencers on Instagram, data collected from SocialBlade revealed a very diverse landscape, with clear winners and losers.
Those who grew up during the purge
Amanda Camaraza was the big surprise: she gained +6,496 followers during the cleanup, the best result among the analyzed Cuban group.
They were followed by Claudia Artiles with +3,749, Rachel Arderi with +3,680, La Dura (Diliamne Jouve González) with +3,442, and Samantha Hernández with +2,919.
That an account grows precisely during a purge of fake accounts is a sign hard to ignore: it means that those who followed it that day are real and active people, indicating an organic and engaged audience.
Amanda Camaraza had reached one million followers in June 2025, a milestone she celebrated with an emotional video, and her growth during the purge reinforces the image of a genuinely loyal fanbase.
The other side of the ranking
The contrast with the most affected is striking.
Sandra Cires Art led the losses with -55,278 followers, more than double that of the second most affected.
Behind were Imaray Ulloa with -21,093 and Pollito Tropical with -19,875, figures that caused a stir on social media, although they do not necessarily indicate any irregularities.
Meta estimates that between 10% and 15% of its active accounts are false or spam, and by 2025 it had already removed over 500 million fake profiles according to its own Transparency Report.
Any profile with followers accumulated over the years could be affected automatically, regardless of its behavior on the platform.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to Instagram: large platforms have been refining inflated metrics for some time now under the pressure from advertisers and regulators demanding more transparent audience data.
X (formerly Twitter) conducted its own cleanup just a month prior, suspending 208 bot accounts per minute.
What the purge made clear is that the number of followers on screen matters less and less: what brands and algorithms value today is real engagement, and in that regard, Cuban influencers who have grown have just proven that they possess something that many high numbers cannot buy.
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