Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have recently lost millions of Instagram followers, but the reason is not a decline in popularity. Instead, the drop appears to be linked to a major fake-account purge carried out by Meta.
The company behind Instagram reportedly launched an aggressive cleanup targeting bots and inactive accounts. In just a few hours, millions of fake profiles were removed from the platform, affecting some of the world’s most-followed celebrities.
Cristiano Ronaldo, currently the most-followed person on Instagram with 666 million followers, is believed to have lost nearly 18 million followers during the operation. Lionel Messi and Dwayne Johnson reportedly saw declines of around five million each, while Neymar lost approximately four million followers.
The purge extended far beyond the sports world. Accounts belonging to Donald Trump, Pope Francis, Justin Bieber and Kylie Jenner were also reportedly impacted.
For stars like Ronaldo, follower counts carry enormous commercial value. The Cristiano Ronaldo is considered one of the highest-paid content creators on social media, with sponsored Instagram posts reportedly worth close to €3 million each.
Although most of the deleted followers were likely fake or inactive accounts, the incident has once again highlighted the financial importance of digital influence in modern sports and entertainment.