Ronaldo, Kylie Jenner among hardest hit accounts as Instagram cleans up bot followers

The “Great Purge of 2026” sweeping across Instagram this week has wiped millions of followers from some of the world’s biggest celebrity accounts, triggering widespread speculation over Meta’s latest AI moderation systems.

Real-time tracking services, including Celebrity Radar and BPT Scans, show that Kylie Jenner was among the hardest hit, reportedly losing between 14 and 15 million followers.

Cristiano Ronaldo is said to have lost about eight million followers, while Selena Gomez saw a decline of nearly six million.

Major drops were also recorded for K-pop group BLACKPINK, Indian cricket star Virat Kohli and football icon Lionel Messi, who reportedly lost around two million and four million followers respectively.

Meta has described the mass decline as part of a “routine process” targeting inactive and bot accounts.

A company spokesperson was quoted as saying that active followers would remain unaffected and added that legitimate accounts mistakenly flagged could be restored through a verification process.

The purge has coincided with Meta’s rollout of a new AI-powered age detection system announced on May 5, 2026.

According to the company, the technology uses visual analysis to estimate a user’s age based on physical characteristics such as height and bone structure.

The timing has fuelled intense speculation online, with users on Reddit and Threads claiming the AI system may be overreaching and incorrectly deactivating genuine accounts, particularly those belonging to younger-looking adults.

Instagram also updated its originality guidelines between May 4 and 5, expanding penalties against accounts that mainly repost photos, videos or carousel content from other users.

The crackdown has reportedly hit aggregator and meme pages especially hard.

As confusion spread across Instagram, many users migrated to Threads to compare follower losses and confirm whether others were experiencing similar drops, turning the controversy into a traffic boost for Meta’s sister platform.