“I Lost 6,000 Followers in 24 Hours”: Why Pregnancy Is Making People Hit ‘Unfollow’

At 20 weeks pregnant while on her babymoon, Erin McGoff, a 30-year-old career advice content creator, punctuated her typically educational posts with a rare personal update. She was pregnant. “Within 24 hours, I’d lost 6,000 followers”, she says. “I posted a picture, and it was like, lights out for me”.

Initially, Erin hadn’t planned to announce her pregnancy at all. “I'm an educational creator, I'm not a lifestyle creator, so no one would really notice because I only film my videos from the chest up”, she says. But she began to feel as though she were keeping a part of herself hidden, both mentally and physically, and her manager assured her that pregnancy announcements were typically “very good for engagement”. Instead, the opposite happened.

Quickly, her post was flooded with comments like “another one bites the dust”, alongside messages lamenting that the “service” she provided was now changing. What shocked her most was that many came from long-time followers; people who had engaged with her work for years.

Although fellow content creators warned Erin she might lose followers by announcing her pregnancy, she wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the vitriol directed at her. “If somebody needs to unfollow because they’re dealing with infertility or maybe they just don’t need my content anymore, that's one thing. But the reaction wasn't related to any of that”, recalls Erin.

“It ruined my babymoon,” she says. “I didn’t post anything for a month afterwards because I was so traumatised.”

Erin isn’t alone. Fitness creator Whitney Simmons was criticised for being “irresponsible” in the face of climate change after announcing her pregnancy in October last year, and Nelly Toledo lost 15,000 followers—alongside brand deals—after announcing her pregnancy. “It was the happiest time of my life, and I felt really alone,” she says. “It was like I was suddenly going to become a ‘mommy blogger’, even though I made it clear my content wouldn’t change.”

This backlash sits within a wider cultural shift. In England and Wales, more than half of women reached 30 without having children in 2020—a record high—and birth rates continue to fall, faster than any other G7 nation. At the same time, online spaces are increasingly shaped by evolving attitudes towards relationships, motherhood, and autonomy.

Dr Charlotte Dann, a critical social and developmental psychologist at the University of Northampton, links this in part to the rise of “heteropessimism”; a growing scepticism towards traditional heterosexual life paths, highlighted through movements like South Korea’s 4B movement, where women ‘boycott’ heterosexual relationships in response to patriarchal expectations. “There is female solidarity in these changes, and better recognition around poor relationships and future generations”, she says. “But the problem is these societal shifts are being mediated by online spaces”.

For others, unfollowing is also about curating their feed. Sarah, 36, describes pregnancy announcements as a “predictable” heteronormativity that she’s not interested in. “I see a baby scan and think, ‘oh here we go’,” she says. “First there will be an engagement—and loads of posts about wedding planning—and next usually comes a photo of a baby with muck all over its face”, she admits.

Even for those hoping to have children in the future, pregnancy announcements can indicate an unwanted shift in content. Annie, a 26-year-old interior designer, enjoys “some mum content” but says “it gets a bit much and boring”. For Annie, the issue seems to lie in the algorithmic structure of social media: “If you follow someone who posts that content, your algorithm starts feeding you [more] even if you aren’t interested”.

On the surface, this feels like a harmless preference, “I think you should be able to choose who you follow and what content you want to see. It’s not that serious”, adds Sarah, but the scale and tone of reactions suggest the response can sometimes be more loaded.

While some women are punished for showing motherhood, others are criticised for not performing it enough. Margot Robbie recently made headlines for reportedly not mentioning her child frequently enough in interviews, prompting speculation about her priorities and identity. The contradiction is stark: women risk losing relevance when they become mothers, yet are scrutinised if motherhood doesn’t visibly define them.

As Professor Abigail Locke, who specialises in gender and parenting, notes, pregnant people often “stop being an individual in the people’s eyes” and instead become “a mum first” in the public imagination.

Dann sees this as mothers being concurrently asked to lean into motherhood or reject it and maintain a separate identity. Both breed criticism centred around what it is to be a ‘good mother’.

Erin finds preemptively unfollowing someone reductive and misogynistic. Referring to the comments she received after her announcement, she says, “even the positive ones were like ‘everything's gonna change now, Mama’. And I was like, ‘don't call me Mama. I'm Erin, like I was before. And, second of all, please stop telling me that my entire identity is going to shift.”. ​

“I got married, I moved cities, I got a dog. None of that made people unfollow me. But for some reason, when I got pregnant, I was put in this box”.

Dann says mothers online “have to fight to override the societal opinion of what motherhood is or what it’s about, and prove that it’s not all-consuming. But at the same time, it is all-consuming”. She says what’s missing in the conversation is thinking about why people assume mothers aren’t relatable.

Perhaps the issue isn’t just that motherhood changes content, but that we’ve collectively decided it makes women less interesting, less relatable, or less valuable.

“I think the more men that make their partner’s pregnancy part of their identity,” Erin says, “the less women will be punished for doing it themselves.” She leaves another thought hanging, “Are people unfollowing men once they become fathers?”