For the past few months, with all of the age verification nonsense being brought in worldwide, platforms have been purging accounts like crazy.

To make matters worse – several of the counters that I normally use, to track subs / followers have gotten stuck or “died”. Which means I can’t do my usual broad comparison (of US / UK comedians) at the moment.

Examples:

• Threads / Livecounts.nl has been “stuck” for about a month. Meaning I can only look at actual accounts, which only show a broad, rounded number
• Facebook / Boomsocial has shown Error 404 for a week – ditto, looking at account totals.

Some of the other counters that have stuck I’ve managed to find replacements for.

So, who has been purging?

Facebook and Instagram I’ve not witnessed any changes, yet.

Threads has been a downward trend for the last 4 days. This is unusual as normally everyone is on an uptick, even if only by double digits.

Hard to tell exactly because the counters are stuck – but, viewing the 3 accounts that I utilise to spot deleting trends, in the last 4 days:

• Jimmy has gone from 495,000 to 493,000 – loss of 2,000
• Jack Whitehall has gone from 593,000 to 589,000 – loss of 4,000
• Russell Howard has gone from 162,000 to 160,000 – loss of 2,000

TikTok – not seen any purging here. Have noticed though that Jack loses followers every day. Since April 6^th this year:

• Jimmy gained 99,625
• Jack lost -3765
• Russell gained 4,151

Twitter / X has been a basket case for ages. Having steadily regained growth, from earlier purges, Jimmy has lost followers again this past 2 weeks, especially since the 11^th when numbers slowly started dropping again. Since May 6^th:

• Jimmy is down -3584
• Jack is down -3759
• Russell is down -1060

For anyone that isn’t familiar with stats like this – Russell’s “smaller drop” is down to it being proportionate to how many followers he has. Their X totals for May 20^th are:

• Jimmy 5,770,891
• Jack 5,245,961
• Russell 1,119,490

Since Jan 1^st 2025 the X total subs change has been:

• Jimmy -692,839
• Jack -597,243
• Russell -106,948

Between them -1,397,030

YouTube has been more stable – although the counters can be erratic – jumping by a couple of 1000 one day and then dropping by a similar amount the next. This seems to be a glitch in the system, rather than a real change in subscriber numbers.

Plus I use Livecounts.io and socialcounts.org and some days they can be wildly different.

The only constant seems to be that Jack’s numbers are going down every day. Looking at his recent videos he’s not posted stand up clips since Feb 2025.

From April 6^th 2026 their variation has been:

• Jimmy gained 52,156
• Jack 1,811
• Russell 2,471

If you’ve noticed that Jack’s positive number contradicts what I said above – on April 10 he gained 3,151 and April 23 gained 2,722, which bucked the trend of every other day, which varied from -26 to -2,891. Must have released something popular on those dates.

Their overall YouTube totals on May 20^th:

• Jimmy 1,910,001
• Jack 1,301,837
• Russell 1,506,189

To put that into perspective, back in Feb 2025, Jimmy was at 1.26m and Jack at 1.32m, so a complete switch around, in 15 months.

Total Subs?

Despite the losses on Threads / X etc. Jimmy’s total is still growing, just at a slower rate than usual, this month.

His subs across his 5 YouTube channels are currently at 2,065,084

Total subs across all the platforms mentioned above are:

• Jimmy 20,063,869 – Feb 2025 was 14,356,109
• Jack 16,183,689 – Feb 2025 was 16,658,842
• Russell 9,058,210 – Feb 2025 was 8,981,554