In May 2026, many of the world's most-followed social media accounts woke up to smaller numbers. During a large cleanup that users online called the "Great Purge of 2026," Instagram's parent company removed millions of fake, bot, and inactive accounts. Cristiano Ronaldo, long the most-followed person on the platform, saw a widely reported drop of several million followers in a matter of hours, and analytics trackers recorded a cumulative decline of more than nine million over