Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo lose millions of followers in Instagram’s bot purge

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Instagram recently removed many fake accounts (bots), causing major stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi to see their follower counts drop by millions.

Even football superstars like Messi and Ronaldo can’t escape the trends and challenges of Instagram, it appears.

When the social media platform removed millions of fake accounts, two famous athletes together lost over 13 million followers.

Instagram culls bots, costing Cristiano Ronaldo 8m followers

Ronaldo experienced a significant drop in followers, losing 8 million in a single day. However, with over 666 million followers remaining, he still leads Instagram as the platform’s most popular account – a number some might find fitting!

Messi recently lost 5 million followers in a large-scale removal of fake accounts. He still remains in second place for total followers with 507 million, significantly ahead of Selena Gomez, who is now in third place after losing 6 million followers herself.

Instagram’s recent actions have affected hundreds of thousands of prominent accounts. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, is working to remove fake accounts, users who haven’t been active, and followers obtained through buying services.

Both Ronaldo and Messi lost a significant number of followers, but Kylie Jenner was affected the most. She lost an incredible 14 million followers in a single night.

People familiar with Instagram and Meta say the companies are likely using artificial intelligence to decide which accounts to remove.

By 2024, Cristiano Ronaldo had built a massive social media following, exceeding 1 billion across all platforms. He currently has over 107 million followers on Twitter (now X), 78 million subscribers on YouTube, and 171 million followers on Facebook.

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2026-05-07 13:18