Bro, I accidentally got a million followers

“It took me seven years to reach a million [followers], and then 20 more days to hit another million. It surely is a lot to take in.”

A popular entertainment content creator sent me this note via their agency earlier this week. The hike in their Instagram follower count in the last three weeks, in their own words, is “surreal”. Since this was around the same time that a “glitch” led to a massive drop in followers for several digital creators on the platform, many initially thought a sudden spike in followers was the glitch’s doing, too. At the same time, some creators have witnessed their following grow at a rather exceptional rate, going from 500,000 to 1 million within a week in one case, prompting observers to make funny reels around it.

     

As per a few screenshots doing the rounds in the creatorverse right now, this “glitch” could be Instagram pushing some accounts as “Instagram Recommended” to new users signing up on the platform.

Instagram did not respond to an emailed query on this so we have no clarity on:

1. Whether this is indeed the case,

2. And if yes, then why did Instagram create this new label when it was already suggesting popular and related accounts for people to follow anyway,

3. Further, who qualifies to be listed as an “Instagram Recommended” user,

4. And finally, how many accounts is the platform pushing with this label at present?

Meanwhile, I asked Qoruz to track the past week’s follower growth of some of the “Instagram Recommended” accounts. Here’s what we found:

In this sample, most users have seen a nominal hike while a few have seen their follower count go up by 15% to 47% in a week. Some creators seemed quite cut up about this even though they did not want to speak openly stating that it could “upset the platform that is their bread and butter”.

Creators across platforms have been struggling with slow follower growth because it is ‘content over creator’ for most of the audience now, as we pointed out in a previous newsletter. This new development, while solving that problem for a few, seems to have intensified the pain of not being able to grow organically for many others.

“No one who is not on this list will take this positively,” says one lifestyle creator who finds the whole thing quite “impossibly twisted”. “If someone gains overnight the kind of following you’ve spent years building organically, you would question if they deserved it. And if I were them, I would like to clarify that I haven’t bought those followers.”

For the record, platforms promoting certain creators’ content to a larger audience is not a new phenomenon. In the initial days of TikTok, its algorithm would push videos of fresh and relatively unknown creators so they had a shot at gaining popularity. When Instagram launched Reels, creators said they were told to pivot to making short videos to grow faster. Similarly, when YouTube introduced Shorts, YouTubers who were making shorts saw a sudden jump in their subscribers.

Here, the platform is not pushing content but the creator to new users. It is rare for a platform’s user recommendation engine (and not content recommendation engine) to cause such a huge spike in someone’s follower count at once. And some creators feel their selection may have been affected because they post controversial content sometimes.

However, “a reasonable percentage of new users on social platforms turn out to be rarely active or inactive accounts,” says Lavin Mirchandani, founder of GetEvangelized, an influencer marketing company. “They cause a short-term follower spike but a long-term drop in the engagement rate for the creators they followed as a part of this onboarding activity,” he adds.

Lavin believes this sudden follower spike “is a gift in the short term that may start taking away in the long term”. “We need to wait and watch how the algorithm optimises this with time,” he says.

Some creators feel this would cost them in the short term, too. “Follower count is a social currency. Acting projects are taken away from you and handed over to someone else purely based on their higher social media following. Brands line up to collaborate with you the minute you become someone who has 1 million followers,” says an actor-creator on the condition of anonymity, highlighting that not everyone understands the concept of “engagement”.

While the platform probably doesn’t care about any of this as long as it makes money, this doesn’t seem like it’ll bode well for the creator egosystem where followers dictate not only financial transactions but even human interactions.

“I have seen people’s behaviour change the minute they gain more followers than me,” says a creator-entrepreneur who also wishes to stay anonymous. “People make or break friendships, and even decide whether to respond to your messages, basis your follower count.”

When buying followers and ‘likes’ is so commonplace, “what will stop someone from buying followers now and legitimising their follower hike by saying they were ‘Instagram Recommended’,” asks one of the creators quoted above. “Unless Instagram comes to clarify, who’ll know it’s not true?”

It is unclear what this new label-led push aims to solve. What’s clear is it has made it difficult for you to tell whose unusual follower growth is legit and whose is bought.

     

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Shephali chronicles how the internet is changing the way we live, and how our changing ways force tech companies to transform themselves. You can write to her on Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin.

Edited by: Shalini Umachandran. Produced by: Samiksha Khanna

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