Barack Obama and other celebs lose millions of followers after Twitter purge
Former US President Barack Obama who has more Twitter followers than any former/current head of state lost more than 2 million followers, after the microblogging site on Thursday began a massive purge of suspicious accounts on the platform.
Obama's official handle '@BarackObama' had more than a 103 million followers on Wednesday, and which dropped to around 101 million by Friday morning. At the time of the Twitter purge, Obama lost around 2,346,119 followers, or more than two percent of his audience on the site.
According to the Daily Beast, Obama remains the third most followed person on Twitter and follows singers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Katy Perry's followers have also dropped and as per reports she initially had around 110 million followers but now has 107 million.
It looks like POTUS' account and followers saw a significant drop as well. Reports claim that his '@realDonaldTrump' account had lost around 320,000 followers, dipping from 53.4 million to 53.1 million. His official presidential account also witnessed a dip of around 60,000 followers.
Recently, Twitter made an announcement that it would be deleting accounts that had been locked on suspicion of being hacked or used as a spam account. Many of these accounts were not able to post anything on the social media platform but once deleted, they won't show up as followers on other people's accounts.
Co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey was also impacted by the change and tweeted that he had lost around 200,000 followers as a result of the purge.