March 20, 2016
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi is the eighth most-followed world leader on Instagram, according to fig-ures released this month.
That puts Khamenehi just behind the president of
Turkey and just ahead of the new president of Argentina. But it gives him less than 8 percent the number of followers that President Obama has on Instagram.
Obama is way out ahead of everyone else with 7.8 million followers of his combined personal account, @barackobama, and official account, @whitehouse.
In distant second place is a surprise, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev with one-quarter as many followers as Obama. Medvedev is an amateur photographer who posts many of his pictures, which might account for his many followers. It isn’t known what President Vladimir Putin thinks of being upstaged by his prime minister; Putin doesn’t even make the Top Ten.
What is perhaps most remarkable is that five of the top 10 world leaders are from the Middle East—in order: the queen of Jordan; the prime minister of the UAE; the president of Turkey; the Supreme Leader of Iran and the president of Egypt.
The study reported that 136 of the 193 UN member states maintain official Instagram accounts, so Instagram has now become the norm.
