To start with, at the very beginning of the year, Instagram decided to do their what is regarded as their regular 'spring cleaning' of Instagram accounts to clear their platform of 'bot' or 'burner' accounts which are essentially either accounts on Instagram that have no activity for an extensive period of time or accounts that have been bought or created cheaply by larger accounts to increase their insights/engagement. Most consumers of an account will understand that how many followers a media/sports/banter/news pages etc. is unfortunately largely a factor that determines whether an individual will follow a page. There could be a million possibilities as to why we do this but my personal opinion is that it is simply human nature and for a long time, it has been 'human nature' to follow what others do which in this case 'if the Instagram account has a large following, I will follow it because (everyone else is doing it)'. Over time, this has created a 'following gap' between major accounts (large corporations/media accounts/ influencers /sports teams etc.) and smaller personal accounts or smaller businesses etc. who are trying to grow their account organically.
Reasons for why Instagram did this?:
Maintaining their account capacity- This is arguably an unlikely reason, but is always a possibility. Instagram simply just want to reduce the amount of accounts that they hold and maintain the current holding capacity and a method of doing this is clearing all fake accounts to make space for genuine users so events like 'crashes' don't occur.
Spam accounts are influencing politics- In events such as elections in the US for counties as well as presidential elections, there has for a while been an argument and outrage from opposition individuals that these accounts have been distributing fake information and misusing campaigns in order to increases a parties own media presence. It was recorded Instagram had removed 754 million Instagram accounts in just 1 quarter as well as similar number of likes being removed from Instagram posts.
Media influencer's and online businesses monetising off fake accounts- Accounts with previously huge followings such as 'Archie, InstaRocketProX, Boostio' and others have been shut down from Instagram completely for charging other accounts for followers, likes, engagement etc. for sums as large as $45/£36 per month. This problem extends to Twitter as well where influencers are purchasing followers for purposes such as gaining sponsorship from food/clothing companies and essentially profit from this.
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