The Huffington Post reported on April 9 that Justin Bieber is not actually the number one celebrity on Twitter. The teen singer was declared the “king of twitter” over Lady Gaga last fall after he supposedly amassed 37 million followers on the social network. A new study, however, found that over half of those followers are fake and that in reality Justin Bieber only has 17.8 million. That figure is short of the 19 million verified followers of Lady Gaga.
SocialBakers, a social media analytics company, determined the validity of celebrity twitter accounts using a number of factors. They looked at if a user had ever tweeted, if they mentioned the word diet or the phrase work at home, if they repeated tweets more than three times and some other factors to judge whether a Twitter user was an actual person.
Sometimes fake users on Twitter are bots used to advertise services, but not always. In last year’s Republican primary Newt Gingrich came under fire for paying for hundreds of thousands of fake Twitter followers. The theory behind buying fake followers is that it makes you look more popular than you actually are.
It remains to be seen where Justin Bieber’s 19.2 million fake followers came from. Lady Gaga had the same metrics applied to her followers.
