- Twitter cleanup has seen many socialites and politicians lose thousands of hoax followers
- The exercise is aimed at expunging suspicious users from the social media platfoam
- President Uhuru Kenyatta and DP William Ruto lost 16,071 and 7,211 followers respectively
- Big Twitter names like Christian Dela and Cyprian Nyakundi both lost more than 500,000 followers
- Obama was also not spared and lost a whopping 2.5 million followers
The ongoing war by Twitter on suspicious account holders has left many users with a diminished number of followers in the micro-blogging site.
Among the biggest casualties were President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto.
Being among the most followed Africa leaders on Twitter, Uhuru suffered a loss of 16,071 users from his 3,234,935 followers while Ruto unpacked 7,211 followers and he is currently having 1,968,355 followers.
Despite Twitter warning that most massively followed individuals will suffer a reduction in their followers, ODM leader Raila Odinga’s case was different. His account accrued 183 more followers from 1,923,245.
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Other Kenyans with a huge following online were not spared in the purge as most them lost hundreds of thousands of followers.
This may in someway also impact on their earnings as most of them are paid hefty sums of money to post content on social media in the name of being 'influencers'.
Netizens took the chance to troll the biggest losers whom they termed as liars who were enjoying benefits of social media forum they did not deserve.
Popular and controversial blogger Cyprian Nyakundi lost 506,000 followers which is nearly half the number of his followers.
Before the cleanup exercise, he had at least 1.2 million followers.
Another blogger, Christian Dela, who had at least one million followers now has 521,000 followers following the online purge.
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Twitter stated the clean up would improve the reliability of the social media platform which has of late been raided by fraudsters.
“Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate,” said Twitter in a blog.This comes hardly one month after household manufacturer Unilever decried losing a lot of money after paying fraudulent online advertisers and social media influencers with outstanding numbers of followers only to realise they were a hoax.
Twitter said that it also blockaded accounts belonging to suspicious users who most of the time were fraudsters.
“In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally,” said the micro-blogging site.READ ALSO: Isiolo governor, 2 MPs cheat death as chopper carrying them crash-lands in Nyeri
On the international scene, retired US President Barack Obama was also not spared by Twitter's comb and he lost a whopping 2.5 million followers.
His successor Donald Trump now has about 1.3 million followers after his numbers dropped from 1.7 million.
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