President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto are among victims of the ongoing purge on fake followers by Twitter.
The two politicians have lost several followers in the crackdown on locked accounts by the global micro-blogging site.
“This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down,” Twitter announced in a blog post earlier this week.
Other Kenyan Twitter bigwigs that have lost thousands of followers in the purge that will see millions of accounts deleted include controversial blogger Cyprian Nyakundi, Kenya Film Classification Board CEO Ezekiel Mutua and social media influencer Xtian Dela.
Nyakundi who had more than 1 million followers now has 696,000, while Dela was left with 521,000 followers down from 1.2 million. ‘Moral policeman’ Ezekiel was left with a only 34,000 followers up from 106,000.
American TV Reality star, Kim Kardashian lost about 2 million followers, leaving her with 58.5 million, while United States President Donald Trump lost at least 300,000 followers.
President Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto lost 15,411 and 6949 followers respectively, while BBC’s Larry Madowo lost 7,835 followers. Citizen TV’s Jeff Koinange lost 11,000 followers.
Billionaire businessman Chris Kirubi lost about 6,000 followers from his 1.2 million before the purge, former US President Barack Obama lost 2 million followers, leaving him with 101 million. Opposition leader Raila Odinga lost about 10,000 followers.
“Our ongoing work to improve the health of conversations on Twitter encompasses all aspects of our service. This specific update is focused on followers because it is one of the most visible features on our service and often associated with account credibility,” Twitter added.
