Kensington Palace Loses Over 150,000 Followers On Instagram In One Night

Kensington Palace lost over 150,000 followers on their Instagram account overnight over a glitch on the social media platform. It is believed that is has something to do with Instagram’s bid to weed out fake accounts that are used to inflate one’s number of followers, as well as those that are linked to apps that offer followers and likes. This has caused changes in the number of followers for a number of people, including the royal’s, Nike and Katy Perry.

“We’re aware of an issue causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now. We’re working quickly to fix this,” an Instagram spokesperson told the press.

Kensington Palace’s Instagram account is the official social media account of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Meghan had to shut down all her social media accounts last year ahead of her marriage with Prince Harry.

Sports firm Nike lost 1.1 million followers while singer Katy Perry lost 900,000 followers. This comes after Instagram said in November that it will do measures to stop the use of fake accounts to boost numbers on their platform.

“We’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity,” the company said that time. “This type of behavior is bad for the community, and third-party apps that generate inauthentic likes follows and comments violate our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.”

Twitter has also announced a similar measure that will change the numbers of followers from time to time as it tries to identify problematic accounts on its platform.

The news also came a few weeks after it was revealed that Kensington Palace receives abusive comments online, mainly targeted to Duchesses Kate and Meghan. Given the number of hate comments, mostly sexist and racists, the Palace even sought the help of Instagram and Twitter to help control the spread of such vicious comments against the Duchesses. The comments come from “rival” supporters of Kate and Meghan.

Kensington Palace has already recovered the lost followers.