48% of Deepika Padukone’s Instagram followers are fake
Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Ellen DeGeneres also followed by large number of bots
Bollywood actors Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra Jonas are among the 10 celebrities who have the largest number of fake followers or “bots” on Instagram.
At sixth place on the fake followers’ list, a massive 48 per cent of Padukone’s followers are bots, according to an analysis from the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP).
At 10th place, 46 per cent of Chopra Jonas’ Instagram followers are fake.
Padukone currently has 37.9 million followers on Instagram while Chopra Jonas has 43.6 million.
At the top is talk show host Ellen DeGeneres with 58 per cent of fake Instagram followers, followed by K-Pop band BTS with 48 per cent.
Kourtney Kardashian was third with 49 per cent, while Kim Kardashian West and Khloe Kardashian both had 44 per cent of fake followers on the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform.
For Katy Perry, 53 per cent of her 83.6 million Instagram followers are reportedly fake.
Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus are also ranked high for bots.
“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,” ICMP said in a statement.
“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 added.
As Instagram continues to grow, influencer marketing has emerged as a major trend in 2019 that earned influencers the highest amount of money for paid posts to date.
Attaining the 19th spot, Chopra Jonas made it to the list along with Indian cricketer Virat Kohli who sits on the 23rd rank. While Chopra Jonas charges $271,000 per post, Kohli charges $196,000.