Several of the most popular celebrities and politicians in India and internationally including likes of Barack Obama, Katy Perry, Narender Modi has lost millions of followers starting last week as the company began culling suspicious accounts, the latest effort to clean up the social media platform.
Twitter last week announced it will remove locked accounts and the move is likely to affect high-profile users the most. Let’s see who lost how many followers on Twitter.
Narender Modi
Let’s start with the PM Narender Modi, according to the sources, the number of Modi’s followers went down to 43.1 million from 43.4 million. Which means he lost nearly 3,00,000 followers in last one week and the official handle (@PMOIndia) lost 1,40,635 followers in last one week.
The decrease in the number of followers is not attributed to politics but to the microblogging platform Twitter addressing the issue of bots and fake followers.
Other Politicians
The Indian National Congress president Rahul Gandhi lost over 17,000 followers while another prominent Congress leader Shashi Tharoor lost 1,51,509 followers.
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) has lost 74,132 followers.
BJP President Amit Shah was lost 33,363 followers, while Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has lost 91,555 followers.
The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama lost 3,77,233 Twitter followers and yoga guru Ramdev had 7,529 fewer followers.
The US president
US President Donald Trump lost about 1,00,000 of his 53.4 million followers and former President Barack Obama lost about 4,00,000 from his 104 million.
Celebrities
Singers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber each lost nearly three million followers. They are the two most popular Twitter accounts, with 110 million and 107 million followers respectively before the purge.
A lot of popular names from the Indian film industry ended up with reduced followers following the initiation of a change on Twitter. Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s extended family on Twitter dropped by more than 424,000, while Shah Rukh Khan’s followers depleted by more than 362,141 and Salman Khan lost 340,884 followers, joining other film celebrities worldwide as a result of the ‘sanitisation’ of the micro-blogging platform.
