Many accounts were caught up in the removal locally. In the clean-up, Facebook removed pages that have been deactivated from the number of total likes every page has. Only accounts that have been manually deactivated will be caught up in the deletion, rather than ones that have been deactivated as a result of not being used.
Instagram removed followers from many accounts in December, reducing follower counts by as much as 15% — a fact that embarrassed some celebrities into deleting their accounts entirely. This clean-up was alot less extreme than that one, since Facebook is not thought to have such a problem with spam accounts, but led to drastic reductions in the number of likes that “some” pages had.
Facebook only expects a “slight dip” in the number of followers, reports Techcrunch. But the exact number of followers lost will depend on the sizes of pages — some with many millions of likes can see a huge drop from only a tiny removal in percentage terms.
Some of the biggest losers in the great purge so far have been Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, with more than 100,000 fans lost. FarmVille lost 41,000, & CityVille 25,000. Many locals lost likes as well Do some searches from memory and see how many had a substantial drop?
