Obama loses 2.5m followers in Twitter purge

Barack Obama, former president of the United States of America, has lost 2.5 million followers to the clean-up exercise being carried out by Twitter.

The social media company had announced that it would delete accounts of fake followers saying prominent accounts could see a significant drop.

Twitter’s main account lost 7.5 million followers in one day from 62.85 million to 55.35 million.

Kim Kardashian-West, US reality TV star, lost 1.7 million followers going from 60.2 million followers to 58.5 million on Thursday.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter chief executive officer, also lost 200,000 followers.

(I lost 200k followers 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼)

— jack (@jack) July 12, 2018

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Donald Trump, the US president, lost 400,000 followers.

Other people affected included Rihanna, who lost 900,000 followers and Justin Bieber, who lost three million followers to 104 million.

Twitter noted on Wednesday locked accounts are different from spam and bot accounts — two other issues that have plagued the platform — in that they were usually started by “real people,” but the company is unable to verify they’re still being run by their initial creators.

Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust, said the clean-up will affect accounts that were frozen over the years for suspicious behaviour.

“This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down.”