It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last. But in the last few hours, a news story has been bouncing swirling around social networks: Instagram has allegedly deleted millions of bot profiles, causing a significant drop in followers for several major creators. But really? There are those who say it for sure, those who attest to this “cleaning” from fake profiles with different numbers from each other. Because of official communications, at the moment, there would be none. There are, however, some data that point in that direction to this shakeup, not unprecedented, which would have affected especially some profiles with a huge amount of followers.
do you understand what just happened to Instagram…
– BuBBliK (@k1rallik) May 6, 2026
META ran the biggest bot purge in platform history
Taylor Swift – 5,000,000 followers gone
Ariana Grande – 7,000,000 followers gone
BTS – 7,000,000 followers gone
Kylie Jenner – 15,000,000 followers gone
more than 50 million … https://t.co/z1ddgGrvFE pic.twitter.com/h21NZWGA7v
Indeed, right on social, there are those who, numbers in hand and data from analytics sites, have tried to quantify this remarkable “hemorrhage.” “Meta has carried out the largest purge of bots in the history of the platform,” writes one user on X, according to which the cut profiles are over 50 million. Very high numbers, probably never recorded before, but of which there is no official confirmation. Apart from comparing the numbers of a few days ago to today’s numbers. For example, again some users compared the figures for the profiles of very prominent personalities. Like Taylor Swift, 275 million followers on Instagram, who, however, reportedly lost about 5 million followers overnight.
Or Ariana Grande, who has 365 million followers and has reportedly seen a drop of 7 million in her following. And still the BTS (-7 million), but also Kylie Jenner (-15 million), Kim Kardashian (-5 million), Cristiano Ronaldo (-6 million). Even Instagram’s Instagram profile, pardon the pun, would be affected by this cleanup, with a loss of nearly 11 million followers. Huge numbers, perhaps never before recorded, which would mean a great numerical loss for some profiles and which would be effective. And of which there will probably be updates in the coming hours, perhaps from Meta itself.
[📸 meta.com/en]
