A new report is calling out fake Instagram followers found on celebrities’ Instagram accounts.
Shockingly, the Kardashians did not win this one.
Ellen DeGeneres takes the cake for the most fake followers: 58 percent of the talk show host’s 74.4 million followers on Instagram are bots, according to an analysis from the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP).
In second is Katy Perry, with 53 percent of her 83.6 million Instagram followers found to be fake.
A Kardashian does enter the list at No. 3, though: Kourtney Kardashian’s Instagram follow list was found to be 49 percent fake — considerably lower than Ellen’s percentage, but still alarmingly high. She also tied with pop star Taylor Swift.
Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and Indian film actress and producer Deepika Padukone also ranked high for phony followers, and Kim and Khloe Kardashian tied with 44 percent fake Instagram followers each.
Rounding out the list was the mega huge K-Pop band BTS (48 percent) — but when the analysis took into consideration their many fake Twitter followers, their overall fake-o-meter ranking jumped to second place.
So why so many faux follows? Celebrities have long been accused of hiring companies that enlist bots to follow their accounts, boosting their follow count and their value as influencers.
But many insist that they’ve been targeted by the bots without their knowledge or approval. The issue came to light when Twitter announced that it would be purging bots in order to eliminate the ones promoting hate speech and political misinformation. In April, President Trump complained to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that his number of followers had plummeted. Dorsey reportedly blamed the broad crackdown on bots.
Bots can do more than ding a celeb’s reputation, too: In 2016, data security company Imperva found that “bad bots,” meaning the kind that can hack passwords or spread viruses, accounted for 28.9 percent of those currently lurking on the web.
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