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Pinterest wipes out 20 percent of followers among Top 10 users

pinterest report
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The effects of Pinterest’s cleaning up of spammy accounts are being felt but the top one percent of users. 99 percent of users would have lost just a few or fewer than 10 followers.

So how bad was the impact felt by the top one percent? TechCrunch reports that according to Lyle Dennis of Top Pinterest Users, as much as 20 percent of followers from the top 10 users disappeared over night. 

But despite the purging, only one user was ousted from the top 10 spots. Otherwise the upper echelon of Pinterest users remain in relatively similar positions, with some shuffling of rankings in the top 10. TechCrunch reports in an example that number one user, Joy Cho /Oh Joy! had 12 million users and fell to below 10 million, before getting back up to over the 10 million mark. She still stands as the most-followed Pinterest user. Jane Wang, a user who had 7.5 million followers moved up three places seeing as how she had the fewest followers lost (approximately 600,000 followers were removed).

Prior to the purge (based on rankings from Social News Daily):

Joy Cho/Oh Joy!: 12,733,689

Bekka Palmer: 8,465,927

Maryann Rizzo: 8,073,270

Bonnie Tsang: 7,889,295

Jane Wang: 7,514,671

pejper: 6,826,436

molly pickering: 6,786,757

Jan of Poppytalk: 6,703,051

HonestlyWTF: 5,483,892

Olya Bastet: 5,162,212

After the clean up (based on the numbers at the time of this writing so it’s possible that some spammers have returned since):

Joy Cho/Oh Joy!: 10,129,664

Jane Wang: 6,878,355

Bekka Palmer: 6,789,276

Maryann Rizzo: 6,746,551

Bonnie Tsang: 5,913,671

molly pickering: 5,438,701

Jan of Poppytalk: 5,413,495

pejper: 5,060,908

HonestlyWTF: 4,394,899

Christine Martinez: 4,256,777

It’s a formidable effort for Pinterest to try and rid the social network of spam accounts. Twitter has become the poster child for these issues, but executing a clean up is easier said than done. Due to the nature and number of parody accounts that exist on the platform, Twitter might have to stick to its case-by-case basis.

Facebook has also recently made efforts to clean up its site. The site reportedly has over 83 million fake profiles (that number will be higher since the report was from August 2012) although scanning through more than 1.1 billion users is a more complicated task than purging a site with just 20 million users like Pinterest.

Francis Bea
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Francis got his first taste of the tech industry in a failed attempt at a startup during his time as a student at the…
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