Big Breaking: Celebrities hit by twitter purge.. see more..

As Twitter begins rolling out its new policy of not including "locked" accounts in follower counts, many of our favorite celebrities have been affected.

As Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's legal, policy and trust and safety lead, said in a blog post, "Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate. Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior. In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts, and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down."

The average Twitter user likely wouldn't have noticed a drastic change in their follower tally, but celebrities like Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and Taylor Swift, have been noticeably affected. According to TIME, Katy has lost 1.5 million Twitter followers, while Justin and Taylor have each lost 2 million followers. Even Barack Obama and Donald Trump were affected, with Obama losing a reported 2 million followers, and Trump losing 340,000 followers.

According to data provided by SocialBlade at the time of writing this report, PM Modi's personal Twitter handle (@narendramodi) has lost as many as 2,84,746 followers in just one day. On July 12, his Twitter account had 43,383,525 followers which dropped to 43,098,779 today (July 13). He also has an official handle (@PMOIndia) which lost 140,635 followers.

The next most affected Indian politician seems to be Congress leader Shashi Tharoor who lost 1,51,509 followers. Tharoor, who is popular for his eloquent tweets, now has 6,587,285 followers as compared to 6,738,794 yesterday