How would you feel if one day you were one of the most popular people in the world and then, suddenly, thousands, or even millions of your fans just up and disappeared?
Well, that’s what’s happening to the likes of President Donald Trump, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and singer Katy Perry due to a change in how Twitter counts its users’ followers.
Earlier this week, Twitter said it would begin removing followers that it has determined to be either fake or suspicious due to irregular types of activity. Twitter said it was doing this to improve security and ensure users’ confidence in their followers.
On Wednesday, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy, trust and safety lead, announced details in a company blog post. Gadde said most significant changes would occur “in the next few days,” but follower counts could continue to be adjusted “as part of our ongoing work to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts.”
So, what has this meant for some of Twitter’s most popular voices? Well, for President Trump, it equals 310,000 fewer followers than the 53.4 million he had before the purge. Elon Musk, who now has 22.3 million followers, lost about 71,000 followers, according to Reuters.
And even we here at the Mercury News have seen the impact of Twitter’s purge, as we now have 232,000 followers, compared to 235,000 earlier this week. (Come on. There have to be at least 3,000 more people around the Bay Area who can start following us and get us back up to that pre-purge figure.)
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wasn’t immune to his company’s actions, as he even went onto Twitter to publicize his losing 200,000 followers.
(I lost 200k followers 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼)
— jack (@jack) July 12, 2018
But those numbers pale in comparison to what some other Twitter titans have lost this week.
Katy Perry, the most followed person on Twitter with 107 million followers, has nearly 3 million fewer followers than before Twitter started removing questionable accounts. Singer Justin Bieber, who trails only Perry for Twitter’s top follower count, also lost 2.7 million followers to slip to 104 million, according to Reuters.
Former President Barack Obama remains immensely popular, with 101 million followers (or nearly twice as many as President Trump), but even he saw a decline of more than 2 million followers over the past week.
And the Kardashian clan, which has never been shy about doing almost anything to get itself in the public eye, has seen its popularity wane a bit.
Kim Kardashian, who on Wednesday had 60.2 million followers, was down to 58.5 million on Friday. Kim’s half-sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner have also seen drops in their followers, with Kylie’s down by 400,000, to 25.2 million, and Kendall’s declining by 500,000, to 26.5 million followers.
But what about Twitter, the implementer of the follower purge? Twitter started Friday with 55.1 million followers of its own, which CNBC said was a 12.4 percent decline from when the follower purge started on Wednesday. That drop equals a loss of 7.7 million followers.
