By Kenneth Atisele
In the company’s effort to delete inactive and spam accounts, many users saw a significant drop in their followers count, in some cases running into millions.
Despite recently breaking the Internet with those Kim Kardashian nude Paper magazine pictures, the reality TV star saw a big break in her fan total as more than 1.3 million were removed.
The best part for Kim, in addition to fewer shady spam accounts following her every move, is that she actually topped Justin Bieber in followers this week.
Kanye West’s wife still has upwards of 22 million legit followers while the Great Instagram Purge of ’14 claimed 3.5 million of Bieber’s 23 million devotees.
Do some simple math, and there’s a new Instaqueen in town.
Kim’s half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner saw their totals dip less sharply, losing only a fraction of their 16.1 million and 14.8 million fans, respectively was lost.
Ariana Grande, meanwhile, lost 1.5 million of her 21 million; Beyonce lost more than 800,000 of 22 million followers and Nicki Minaj 500,000 of 12.5 million.
Some, like Nicki, didn’t seem to mind the loss in followers.
‘Them 500K ppl really thought they was following me tho. Yall played yall self. @instagram,’ the rapper wrote, with many users using the laughing out loud emoticons.
Bravo’s Andy Cohen encouraged Twitter to do the same.
‘I lost 20k followers in the #InstagramPurge,’ the producer non-lamented, ‘and I’m feeling cleaner than ever! Only real people, please! Twitter, next?’
