Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s extended family on Twitter dropped by more than 424,000, while Shah Rukh Khan’s followers depleted by more than 362,141 and Salman Khan lost 340,884 followers, joining other film celebrities worldwide as a result of the ‘sanitisation’ of the micro-blogging platform.
Twitter initiated a change on the platform Friday by removing from the count inactive and locked accounts. Which meant a lot of popular names from the film industry ended up with reduced followers.
SocialBlade.com, which tracks the number of Twitter followers on a daily basis, had a tab on the count, and said Aamir Khan lost 316,900-plus followers, while Priyanka Chopra lost 354,830 followers and Deepika Padukone lost 288,298.
The micro-blogging platform was yet to come up with an official statement on this.
Twitter earlier this week announced it will remove locked accounts — which are disabled owing to suspicious activity — from follower counts across profiles globally. The locked accounts are different from spam or bots and in most cases, the accounts were created by real people.
The move is likely to affect high-profile users the most.
Celebrities like Divya Dutta, Onir and Apurva Asrani reacted on losing followers overnight.
Dutta, who currently has a following of 493,000 fans on the micro-blogging website, tweeted on Thursday night: “Aiyyo, what happened Twitter... Sudden drop of thousands of followers in one hour!”
Filmmaker Onir wrote: “I just realised I lost 1,000 overnight... Same pinch... Laugh out loud Twitter India. What’s the secret?”
Writer-editor Apurva Asrani tweeted: “I lost 500 followers overnight. Wondering if this is the clean up of bots that Twitter mentioned earlier.”
