Fans flee? Dana White and the UFC see nearly half a million followers vanish after change

Photo by Mat Hayward/Getty Images

Fans flee? Dana White and the UFC see nearly half a million followers vanish after change

Originally posted on HITC | By Kyle Dimond | Last updated May 9, 2026 2:24 PM ET

A recent update from Instagram has led to several large accounts losing followers, as bots and inactive users were removed from the platform.

With fight night in Newark approaching, Dana White has been keeping an eye on the ongoing tension between Khamzat Chimaev and Sean Strickland.

Even before Chimaev’s outburst toward Strickland, their ongoing issues had already drawn significant attention. The press conference even drew more live viewers than the last four events combined.

While this weekend’s event is expected to pull strong numbers, a new report says that UFC content will no longer be reaching nearly 480,000 Instagram accounts due to those removals.

Photo by Jack Gorman/Getty Images

Instagram removes nearly 400,000 followers from UFC account after a clean-up of fake and inactive profiles

Speaking to Bloody Elbow earlier this year, Cage Warriors president Graham Boylan pointed to social media as the promotion’s biggest learning curve.

No one can deny how important social media has become for promoting fights and events. Still, not every user is actually engaging with the content.

Jed I. Goodman reported on X that the UFC’s Instagram account lost more than 398,000 followers, while Dana White saw a drop of over 81,000. This came after Instagram filtered out fake and inactive accounts.

It wasn’t just those two profiles that were affected. Other notable accounts in MMA also saw significant drops in follower numbers.

Khabib Nurmagomedov took the biggest hit among them all, losing over 570,000 followers.

Islam Makhachev reportedly lost more than 75,000 followers while Jon Jones’s count dropped by about 74,700. The biggest change though was to the official Instagram account itself, which dropped nearly 11 million followers in total.

This article first appeared on HITC and was syndicated with permission.

More must-reads: