Kim, BTS, Ellen and Other Kings and Queens of Fake Instagram Followers

ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) revealed a list of celebrities with most fake followers. Kim Kardashian, Ellen DeGeneres, BTS, and Kourtney Kardashian all have over 44% of fake followers.

The infamous list is followed by the rest of Kardashian-Jenner clan, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Kevin Hart, and Drake. The statement from ICMP said: “We took various ‘most successful’ and ‘most followed’ to build our list of celebrities across acting, sport, music, and TV personalities. We then filtered this by the number of followers to give ourselves a top 100 most followed list.”

“We then ran their Instagram and Twitter handles through IG Audit and Sparktoro’s fake Twitter follower’s tool to measure what percentage of their following was actually real,” it also noted. So why do celebrities bother with fake Instagram followers? Simple: money! How does this whole fake thing work?

Celebrities, such as Kim Kardashian or BTS, employ companies which “hire” bots to boost their image and their value as social network influencers go higher and higher. Many insist that they’ve been targeted by the bots without their knowledge, which is a safe way to steal someone’s passwords. But we are talking about paid bots here, known as fake Instagram followers, despite being present on Twitter and Facebook as well.

When you have that amount of followers, you negotiate your next business move. If a company wants to hire you, they will have to adjust your salary to the number of followers. But don’t think that celebrities buy cheap, useless bots. They get only the best, the ones that interact, “like” photos and comment. Social media networks cannot stop these fake accounts, though Instagram is still exploring to ban likes.

The issue with bots and fake accounts is that they are not just influencing people who are selling you makeup or shoes. They also spread messages connected to politics, world economy, human rights and more. The whole thing is like the black market for the internet era. If you aren’t scared by now, you should be.

Since everything is about likes, ratings, and approval, bots are used to write fake reviews on trusted websites. They post comments on the news sites, so most successful and most followed news sources may be just as real as the numbers you see on Instagram. In a digital era, where everything is one click away, we never needed common sense more. And yes, this all applies to Youtube as well. Crazy world we live in, don’t you agree?