Narendra Modi loses 300,000 followers, Rahul Gandhi loses 17,000 as Twitter removes locked accounts from follower counts

New Delhi: As Twitter began sanitising its platform by removing inactive and locked accounts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday lost nearly 300,000 followers while Congress Party President Rahul Gandhi lost over 17,000 followers. The number of Modi’s followers went down to 43.1 million from 43.4 million. According to SocialBlade.com, that tracks the number of Twitter followers on a daily basis, Modi’s personal Twitter handle (@narendramodi) lost 2,84,746 followers. The official handle (@PMOIndia) lost 140,635 followers. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) has lost 17,503 followers while Congress leader Shashi Tharoor lost 1,51,509 followers. The micro-blogging platform was yet to come up with an official statement on this. [caption id=“attachment_4737391” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of prime minister Narendra Modi. Getty images.[/caption] Twitter earlier this week announced it will remove locked accounts — which are disabled owing to suspicious activity — from follower counts across profiles globally. The move is likely to affect high-profile users the most. With this clean-up exercise, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) has lost 74,132 followers. While BJP President Amit Shah was left poorer by 33,363 followers, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has lost 91,555 followers. Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah has lost 21,878 followers, SocialBlade.com showed. While Union textiles minister Smriti Irani lost 41,280 Twitter followers, the number of followers BJP leader Subramanian Swamy lost on the platform also stood at nearly 41,000. Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav saw a drop of over 2,200 in his number of followers on the microblogging site. Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama lost 377,233 Twitter followers and yoga guru Ramdev Baba had 7,529 less followers on Twitter on Friday, according to SocialBlade.com. US president Donald Trump lost about 100,000 of his 53.4 million followers and former president Barack Obama lost about 400,000 from his 104 million. “We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Head, said in a blog post earlier this week. The locked accounts are different from spam or bots and in most cases, these accounts were created by real people.