All around the world, celebrities buy social media followers—and by this, a bunch of kids and companies in places like India use bots to create fake accounts which they sell to these celebrities.
This means, a celebrity would have 1,000 facebook followers and within a week increase this number to 1 million. It sounds exciting, empowering and somewhat heightens the ego of a celebrity to have huge followers. But the only problem in this case is, the 900,000 ‘people’ would be fake, at best robot accounts.
Last year, Instagram took a big hit at the various celebrities who had fake followers—and through this exercise, Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million followers. That’s a staggering 3.5 million followers being deleted as fake.
It was not only Bieber who was caught with fake Instagram followers, Akon’s 4.3 million followers decrease drastically to 1.9 million; more than half of his followers were declared fake.
Under the same exercise, Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million Instagram followers, Ariana Grande lost 1.5 million, Beyoncé lost more than 800,000 followers, Rihanna lost about 1.2 million, Katy Perry lost 300,000, and even Oprah had 100,000 followers deleted.
Business Insider reported at the time that, “Rapper Mase lost so many followers he decided to delete his account entirely. According to one Twitter user, Mase dropped to 100,000 followers from 1.6 million in a matter of 20 minutes.”
Of course the deletion of followers by Instagram does not mean all the celebrities bought the followers—but what it means for sure is that, the followers are fake. How they acquired them, we cannot establish.