The two football superstars shocked fans after suddenly losing millions of followers on the social media platform Instagram within just a few hours.
The dramatic drop was not caused by controversies or negative reactions from fans.
Instead, it is reported that it happened after Instagram carried out a massive cleanup operation targeting fake profiles, inactive pages, and bot accounts across the platform. According to social media tracking pages, Ronaldo lost more than eight million followers overnight, dropping from 674 million followers to 666 million.
Meanwhile, Messi’s account dropped by more than five million followers, going from 512 million followers to 507 million.
Despite the huge numbers, both football icons remain among the most-followed people in the world on Instagram.
If anything, the cleanup revealed just how many fake accounts follow celebrities and major public figures.
Social media platforms regularly remove suspicious or automated accounts in order to improve authenticity and engagement accuracy, but the scale of Instagram’s latest purge caught many users by surprise.
