If you looked at the numbers Wednesday, it appeared that millions of Kanye West’s Twitter followers felt that they had been putting up with Kanye’s shit just way too long—hitting that unfollow button after the rapper and producer declared his “love” for Donald Trump.
Tweets from Yeezy’s account Wednesday afternoon showed the rapper sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat. He also defended his right to “independent thought,” saying, “You don’t have to agree with Trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother.”
“I love everyone,” West added.
West’s tweets effectively smashed Twitter—and productivity—to smithereens. Donald Trump retweeted West’s endorsement. West took a photo of Trump’s retweet of West’s endorsement. And millions of West’s Twitter followers appeared to decide that they’d had enough of the whole thing.
As the New York Post’s Page Six observes, when West began his ‘MAGA’-fest, he had about 28 million followers. After Trump’s retweet, however, that number appeared to drop to 18.7 million.
But a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that the lower follower count was an error.
“Any fluctuation that people might be seeing is an inconsistency and should be resolved soon,” the spokesman said in a statement.
And lo and behold, as of 9 a.m. EDT Thursday, West’s follower count appeared to be back up to 27.9 million—slightly (that is, if 100,000 can be considered “slight”) lower than his follower count Wednesday morning.
Other outlets, like PopCrave, have paid attention to the more notable names that have jumped Kanye’s Twitter ship. Among them are Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar and longtime collaborator John Legend.
The Twitter tool Does Follow also verified that neither Cardi B (whom Kanye tweeted he would love to see on tour with Nicki), Chrissy Teigen nor Kendrick’s labelmate SZA follow Kanye at the moment, though it’s unclear if they ever did, or if they unfollowed the designer-producer prior to Wednesday.
Cosmopolitan magazine adds that neither Khloé Kardashian nor Kylie Jenner follows her brother-in-law at this point.
Well, the man told you that you couldn’t tell him nothing, right?