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Instagram has cracked down on bots on its platform, and superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have lost millions of followers as a result.
They may be two of the greatest footballers of all time, but even Messi and Ronaldo are not immune to the whims of Instagram, it seems.
As the social media platform cleansed its customer base of millions of bot accounts, the two legendary athletes lost more than 13 million followers between them.
Instagram culls bots, costing Cristiano Ronaldo 8m followers
Ronaldo took the biggest hit of the pair, losing 8 million followers overnight. Granted, he’s still got more than 666m followers, with that devilish figure keeping him at the top of the Instagram charts as the most popular account on the social media platform.
Messi, meanwhile, saw 5 million of his followers disappear in the so-called purge. The Argentinian icon now has 507m followers, keeping him in second place when it comes to follower count, with almost 100 million more followers than Selena Gomez, who is third despite losing 6m followers.
The move by Instagram has impacted hundreds of thousands of high-profile accounts. It’s a plan by Meta to clear out spam accounts, inactive users, and non-organic followers that may have been purchased through third-party services.
Instagram: mdmotivator
While the impact on both Ronaldo and Messi is huge, it wasn’t as big as Kylie Jenner, who saw the biggest drop in follower count during the purge. Jenner lost a whopping 14 million followers overnight.
Industry insiders believe Instagram and Meta are putting AI to work to determine which accounts to delete.
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Ronaldo amassed over 1 billion followers across all of his social media accounts back in 2024. He still has 107m followers on Twitter/X, over 78m subscribers on YouTube, and 171m followers on Facebook.
