Since rumors about Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber making fun of Selena Gomez first surfaced, the singer seems to have garnered close to 13 million Instagram followers.
According to Social Blade, the artist had 393,087,497 followers as of publication as opposed to 393,240,643 million on February 21 when the incident started, a difference of 12,846,854 followers. The social media analytics website claims that Gomez’s increase in monthly followers is pretty considerable; she got over 15.5 million followers in February as opposed to a fairly huge increase of 9.6 million followers in June. Fans who have observed celebrities being followed or unfollowed on social media sites to show support or disapproval think the changes are due to the turmoil that has grown so commonplace it has become a meme.
Although the impact is less significant than Gomez’s increases, Jenner and Bieber have seen declines in their fan bases. According to Social Blade, Jenner appears to have lost 494,581 followers over that time (going from 380,523,687 to 380,029,106). It looks like Hailey Bieber has lost 922,250 followers (dropping from 50,663,086 to 49,740,836).
Others said they had started following Gomez in support of her after numerous allegations of trouble.
Early last week, the 30-year-old artist surpassed Jenner to become the Instagram user with the most followers. Leo Messi is the athlete with the second-highest number of followers (436 million), followed by Cristiano Ronaldo, who has 555 million, and Selena Gomez, who has 393 million.
Gomez joked in a video she shared on February 21 that she had unintentionally over-laminated her eyebrows.
Soon later, Jenner shared two images to her Instagram stories: the first was a picture with the caption “This was an accident???” written over her eyebrows, and the second was a snapshot of a FaceTime with Bieber in which the two were close enough to only be able to see each other’s eyebrows.
Those watching Jenner quickly assumed she was making fun of Gomez.
On February 22, Jenner made a remark on a well-liked TikTok, calling the women’s actions “mean girls” and the posts “childish.” Jenner said it “silly” to think she was “shading” Selena.
This is over the top, Jenner said. “No shade ever directed towards Selena, and I didn’t see her postings about her eyebrows! You people are inventing things out of thin air. This is absurd.
Agreed @kyliejenner, Gomez replied to Jenner. Everything of it is superfluous. I enjoy Kylie’s music.
Since then, followers have seen further TikTok posts from Gomez’s account that they feel show she is not as disinterested in the matter as she first appeared to be.
The new claims have not yet been addressed publicly by Bieber, who moderates comments on her social media accounts. She has continued to update her Instagram account, and she just posted a homage to her husband, Justin Bieber. Several users have claimed that her account prevented specific phrases, including Gomez’s name, from appearing in Instagram postings. Selena’s name was successfully included in comments, however people who were tagged in such remarks didn’t seem to receive a notification (Insider repeated the experiment and discovered the same results).
On a TikTok Live, Gomez first informed followers that she would take a hiatus from social media because she is “too old for this,” but her Instagram account has subsequently continued to post.
The 53.2 million-follower TikTok account of the singer of “Lose You to Love Me” was momentarily inactive on February 23 but has since been reinstated. The 21st of February was the most recent upload.
Gomez has already talked extensively about her complex interaction with social media. Gomez admitted to Vanity Fair in February that she had previously hired employees to manage her social media accounts because she felt the unwelcome criticism was ultimately a “waste of my time.”
In a difficult split, she added, “I didn’t want to read any of the [comments] โ not necessarily about the relationship, but the opinions of myself against [someone] else.” There would be a ton of very great comments, but I automatically think about the negative ones.
Gomez claimed that TikTok was the only social media application she used at the time because she thought it was “a bit less nasty.”
Insider’s request for comment was not immediately answered by Jenner, Bieber, or Gomez’s reps.