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The celebrities and brands who lost the most in Facebook's latest like purge

The celebrities and brands who lost the most in Facebook's latest like purge

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Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it would be "making page likes more meaningful" by nixing inactive accounts. So if your page had 10 million likes, 1 million of which were from inactive accounts, you suddenly dropped down to 9 million. This is far from the first time that Facebook has made celebrities and teens cry by slashing their page likes — in December, Justin Bieber, rapper Tyga, and others lost more than 3 million Instagram followers each in a mass cleanup.

So who were the biggest losers this time around? Social media analytics platform CrowdTangle tracked more than 80,000 pages from March 11th, when the purge started, through this morning. We’ve rounded up the celebrities, brands, movies, and TV shows who lost the most — in some cases, almost 10 percent of their entire fan bases.

In the celebrity fake-follower category, we have:

1. Rihanna: -7,986,973 (9.8% of likes)
2. Shakira: -6,855,640 (6.8% of likes)
3. Katy Perry: -5,632,634 (7.8% of likes)
4. Lady Gaga: -5,470,021 (8.9% of likes)
5. Michael Jackson: -5,063,200 (6.7% of likes)
6. Beyoncé: -4,937,853 (7.9% of likes)
7. Lil Wayne: -4,817,374 (9.3% of likes)
8. AKON: -4,615,180 (8.7% of likes)
9. Selena Gomez: -4,540,000 (8.0% of likes)
10. Avril Lavigne: -4,417,463 (8.3% of likes)

Brands with the saddest social media managers:

1. YouTube: -5,796,122 (7.2% of likes)
2. Coca-Cola: -5,000,475 (5.6% of likes)
3. MTV: -4,064,977 (8.5% of likes)
4. Texas HoldEm Poker: -3,719,075 (5.5% of likes)
5. Disney: -3,467,508 (7.4% of likes)
6. Converse: -3,207,291 (8.5% of likes)
7. Red Bull: -3,197,328 (7.5% of likes)
8. Oreo: -2,621,539 (6.6% of likes)
9. Starbucks: -2,489,603 (7.0% of likes)
10. Skype: -2,430,956 (8.0% of likes)

And finally, the movies and TV shows whose fans have fled:

1. The Simpsons: -5,220,767 (7.5% of likes)
2. Harry Potter (the movies): -4,772,742 (6.7% of likes)
3. Family Guy: -4,474,455 (8.6% of fans)
4. SpongeBob SquarePants: -4,348,905 (8.0% of likes)
5. South Park: -3,952,825 (8.4% of likes)
6. The Twilight Saga: -3,773,484 (8.4% of likes)
7. Titanic: -3,493,285 (6.2% of likes)
8. Avatar: -3,445,217 (6.9% of likes)
9. Toy Story: -2,623,388 (8.0% of likes)
10. House: -2,478,546 (6.0% of likes)

Facebook was careful to emphasize that only memorialized and "voluntarily deactivated" accounts were affected — but when millions of your fans up and leave Facebook, you have to wonder. Maybe the people wanted to hear from the real RiRi, not her league of PR reps. Maybe Oreo made one too many cookie-themed dad puns. Or maybe everyone who came of age with Titanic in 1997 is just bored of Facebook.

Verge Video from SXSW 2015: Getting "activated" by the #brands of SXSW