Prime Minister Narendra Modi and actor Amitabh Bachchan have lost nearly three lakh and over four lakh Twitter followers respectively in just one day after the microblogging site began to clean up its platform from fake users.
The ‘sanitisation’ work saw the number of followers for Modi fall from 43.5 million to 43.1 million between Thursday and Friday, while Bachchan saw his number of followers drop by 424,000.
The development is likely to irk the Bollywood megastar, who had previously attacked Twitter after he felt that the number of his followers wasn’t going up. In May this year, Bachchan had written, “Dear Twitter Management, its quite amazing how you manage to keep numbers of followers CONSTANT, & not moving AT ALL despite maximum activity !!.. well done !! I mean how do you keep the scoreboard from not moving despite every ball being hit for a 6 !!”
T 2793 – Dear Twitter Management , its quite amazing how you manage to keep numbers of followers CONSTANT, & not moving AT ALL despite maximum activity !!?????.. well done !! I mean how do you keep the score board from not moving despite every ball being hit for a 6 !! pic.twitter.com/oDZU9xxYAZ
— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) May 2, 2018
This was after, in a similar attack, Bachchan had threatened to leave the platform calling it a joke for the same reason. He had tweeted, “TWITTER ..!!!?? you reduced my number of followers .. !!??HAHAHAHAHAHAHA .. !! that’s a joke .. time to get off from you .. thank you for the ride .. .. there are many ‘other’ fish in the sea – and a lot more exciting !!”
T 2599 – TWITTER ..!!!?? you reduced my number of followers .. !!??HAHAHAHAHAHAHA .. !! thats a joke .. time to get off from you .. thank you for the ride .. ??? .. there are many ‘other’ fish in the sea – and a lot more exciting !! pic.twitter.com/85c15pDif4
— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) January 31, 2018
The sudden reduction in Bachchan’s followers on Twitter left his fans shocked as they reacted angrily.
https://twitter.com/Swetaprasad19/status/1017595136824315904
@iamsrk sir apke followers kaise kaam ho rhe phle @SrBachchan sir k hue ab #Srk sir k what wrong with you what you wana do ! ??@Twitter @TwitterIndia @TwitterSupport
— @SRKFanSaurabh (@SRKFAN_555) July 13, 2018
@Twitter wala Bhai ap ka @SrBachchan sa Kiya dushmani ha Q followers kam kar raha ho??? pic.twitter.com/QPm08FuUJ7
— Shubman Baloch (@shahabM77) July 13, 2018
Aside from Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan too had his followers dropped by over 362,141 and Salman Khan 340,884 among other celebrities. What will not go down well with Bachchan is that Shah Rukh still has more nearly 36 million followers, considerably more than that of the former. Twitter had recently announce to sanitise its platform by removing inactive and locked accounts.
A website that tracks the social media users and their activities said that Aamir Khan too had lost 316,900-plus followers, while Priyanka Chopra lost 354,830 followers and Deepika Padukone lost 288,298.
Among politicians, Modi’s rival and Congress president, Rahul Gandhi, saw the number of his followers drop by just 12,644. The number of his followers came down from 7,236,822 on 12 July to 7,224,178 a day later.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is one of the most prolific Twitter user politician in India, saw a drop of 89,962 followers on the microblogging site.