Former US president Barrack Obama has lost more than 3m Twitter followers just days before his first visit to the country as a private citizen.
The former US president was among Twitter bigwigs who lost followers following the Twitter Clean up that started on Wednesday. The cleanup, which will run for a week will see Twitter do away with more than 10m fake accounts.
On Wednesday, Twitter through it’s legal, policy, trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde, said it has started removing the profiles of followers whose accounts have been locked by the company’s security team, and who have been inactive for a significant length of time.
She added that most Twitter users will see a decline of about four followers, while celebrities and public officials are likely to witness their follower-count drop by the hundreds of thousands.
DONALD TRUMP
According to the Washington Post, President Donald Trump’s Twitter followers fell by 100,000, from the 53.4 million he had Tuesday night.
Oprah Winfrey, who will be accompanying Obama to the country, also lost around 1.4m followers.
Locally, self-acclaimed twitter Kings were also not spared from the cut, Cyprian Nyakundi went down from 1.1m followers to less than 700k followers while his arch nemesis Xtiandela went from 1m followers to around 520k.
Twitter itself was not spared as its main account lost about 7.7m, which is around 12%, of its followers.
PAUL KAGAME
Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame took a 600k hit while International celebrities like Rihanna, Ellen DeGeneres lost 2m followers each.
Kenya Films and Classification Board boss Ezekiel Mutua also had his account audited and 70% of his following was classified as fake. This saw his followers numbers dwindle from 106k to 34k.
