Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s extended family on Twitter dropped by over 424,000, while Shah Rukh Khan’s followers decreased by 362,141 and Salman Khan’s, by 340,884.
Other film celebrities also lost thousands of followers as a result of the sanitization of the micro-blogging platform.
Twitter decided to sanitize the platform by removing inactive and locked accounts. SocialBlade.com, which tracks the number of Twitter followers on a daily basis, had a tab on the count, and said Aamir Khan lost 316,900-plus followers, Priyanka Chopra, 354,830 followers, and Deepika Padukone, 288,298.
Twitter hasn’t released an official statement on this but had announced earlier this week that it would remove locked accounts (those disabled owing to suspicious activity) from follower counts globally. Locked accounts are different from spam or bots; in most cases, these accounts are created by real people.
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The move is likely to affect high-profile users the most.
Celebrities including Divya Dutta, Onir, and Apurva Asrani reacted on losing followers overnight.
Divya, who currently has a following of 493,000 fans, tweeted on Thursday night: ‘Aiyyo, what happened Twitter... Sudden drop of thousands of followers in one hour!’
Filmmaker Onir wrote, ‘I just realised I lost 1,000 overnight... Same pinch... Laugh out loud Twitter India. What's the secret?’
Writer-editor Apurva Asrani tweeted, ‘I lost 500 followers overnight. Wondering if this is the clean up of bots that Twitter mentioned earlier.’
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