If you’re one of the 35 percent of US adults who use Instagram, you may have awoken Wednesday morning to a bit of a shock: Follower counts across the platform had dropped overnight, with some of the more prolific users losing millions. While many at first speculated that this dramatic reduction was due to yet another round of bot purges, Instagram soon confirmed that a bug was the real culprit.
While this story may at first seem trivial – is it really such a huge deal that Selena Gomez’s depleted follower numbers led to Ariana Grande being crowned the new Instagram pop queen? – it does bring a much more important issue back to the forefront, one posed just last September by cybersecurity expert Raj Goel:
