After Twitter’s recent drive to remove inactive and locked accounts, a number of political leaders and actors including Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and actor Amitabh Bachchan ended up losing followers on the social-networking site.
According to SocialBlade.com, that tracks the number of Twitter followers regularly, PM Modi (@narendramodi) lost around 3,00,000 followers which marked a dip of 0.69 per cent in his previous followers’ count of 43.4 million. However, Rahul Gandhi’s (@RahulGandhi) loss of followers is significantly less than Modi’s, with the opposition leader losing only around 0.23 per cent followers which brought down the number to 7.23 million.
In March this year, a study conducted by Twiplomacy – a digital platform to improve government’s and organisations’ digital strategy – had reported that PM Modi had around 60 per cent fake followers on Twitter.
The Prime Minister’s Office (@PMOIndia) also suffered a loss of 1,40,635 followers which brought down the number by 0.52 per cent.
The cleaning up drive came after Twitter’s announcement of removing locked accounts which are disabled for suspicious activities globally earlier this week.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah (@AmitShah) saw a decrease in his Twitter followers with the site removing Shah’s 33,363 followers (0.29 per cent), while Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) lost Twitter followers by 0.66 per cent.
Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) lost around 1.15 per cent followers which brought him down to the second spot among Bollywood’s most followed actors’ list – he was behind Shah Rukh Khan (@iamsrk) who has 35.7 million followers on Twitter.
United States President Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) lost 0.18 per cent followers from among 53.4 million followers.
“We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency makes Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Head, wrote in a blog post earlier this week.
