It’s not news that President Donald Trump has always loved to speak his mind on Twitter, but now, he’s going to be doing it to a smaller number of followers than he had before. On Wednesday, Twitter announced that they were performing a “purge,” of sorts, which would get rid of frozen or suspicious accounts. With the removal of a number of accounts, Donald Trump ended up losing close to 200,000 “followers” that he speaks to in a limited amount of characters.
Early reports had the president losing just around 100,000 followers in his count on Twitter, but the Hollywood Reporter states that the number has continued to grow. By late Thursday night, the president had officially lost close to 196,000 followers as the purge kept on going.
Oddly enough, as Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account has lost a lot of followers, the official account of the president of the United States has grown. By Thursday evening, the @POTUS handle had actually gained a number of followers, even though the numbers are still continuing to fluctuate a little here and there.
Barack Obama was also a victim of the Twitter purge as he ended up losing around 2 million followers, but he’s still well over 100 million. Justin Bieber lost close to the same amount as the former president, but many other celebrities saw their numbers drop too and that includes the CEO of Twitter himself.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lost 200,000 followers in fake-user purge https://t.co/8qw4zoPQu2 pic.twitter.com/hEOt4zfaYt
— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) July 13, 2018
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey ended up watching his number of followers drop around 200,000 thanks to the purge. The fake and frozen accounts out there were a huge part of many user follower counts, but they aren’t going to be any longer.
Here are the numbers for a few other celebrities who saw their numbers go down:
- Katy Perry – Lost 3 million
- Taylor Swift – Lost 1.8 million
- Rihanna – Lost 856,000
- Ashton Kutcher – Lost 1.1 million
- Shaquille O’Neal – Lost around 1 million
- Kim Kardashian West – Lost a “couple million”
- Oprah Winfrey – Lost 1.4 million
- Ellen DeGeneres – Lost 2 million
Twitter announced the purge was coming and told users that most would typically see a loss of usually fewer than four followers. Of course, those with higher numbers to start with would end up seeing a greater loss as the decrease would be more obvious.
Donald Trump has long enjoyed getting his mind out there and letting the world knows what he thinks by using social media services such as Twitter. He’s likely still going to keep tweeting out news and calling others out on their fake news reports, but the president and many others are going to be doing it to smaller audiences thanks to the Twitter purge.
