New Website Detects Many “Fake Followers” on Hong Kong Celebrity Instagrams
Instagram’s own crackdown on fake followers is making progress, but some fake accounts have managed to slip through the cracks. Recently, Plurk’s co-creator Alvin Woon dropped a new website (HotInfluencer) that tracks the followers demographic of many popular IG stars, particularly artists from Hong Kong.
According to the website, HotInfluencer is a website that “tracks daily engagement rate, fake followers and followers demographic of Instagram influences.” The website describes fake followers as “followers with behaviors that fit a certain set of criteria of being ran by non-human bots,” including consistent posting schedules, the lack of a profile photos, auto-likes based on tags, auto-likes within seconds of the parent post, and a predictable follow and unfollow pattern.
HotInfluencers separates IG influencers into different categories, including fashion, travel, beauty, and entertainers. The TVB stars who have a record on the website include Ali Lee (李佳芯), Moon Lau (劉佩玥), Grace Chan (陳凱琳), Elaine Yiu (姚子羚), Nancy Wu (胡定欣), Ruco Chan (陳展鵬), and more.
Ali Lee, Moon Lau, Elaine Yiu, Grace Chan, Joel Chan (陳山聰), and Lai Lok-yi (黎諾懿) all have over 30 percent of fake followers. Carat Cheung (張名雅), who has 90,000 followers on Instagram, has a fake following percentage of 47 percent. Penny Chan (陳國峰), with 30,000 followers, has 49.8 percent. Ruco Chan, with 300,000 followers, has 43 percent. Priscilla Wong (黃翠如), with nearly a million followers, has 20 percent. Nancy Wu, at 1.3 million followers, has 23 percent. Interestingly, most of Priscilla and Nancy’s followers are from Taiwan.
Non-TVB stars such as Angelababy, with a following of 6 million, has around 23 percent. G.E.M. (鄧紫棋), at 4.4 million followers, also has 23 percent. K-Pop stars like EXO’s Chanyeol, EXO’s Sehun, and Big Bang’s G-Dragon have 20 percent or less.
A lot of these “fake followers” aren’t necessarily bought by the influencer, although there is definitely that possibility. Sometimes, fakes accounts are purchased by fans, or they are random spam accounts hoping to sell products.
Source: HK01.com
This article is written by Addy for JayneStars.com.
As a public figure, I guess it’s suppose to make their accounts “look good,” but honestly, if this article didn’t talk about it, I wouldn’t have even looked into it. xD
Honestly don’t think it rlly matters. Other than it’s a fact and probably interesting to read, what harm can it do?
@mi88 well, according to another article I read, the higher followers in weibo means more valuable/in trend/hot the artist is. Also it is to brought in more fans and to keep current fans happy to see their idol is on the top of the hot search list, and the news about her/him is always on circulation. The practice of having fake followers are tend to be mostly done by the artist’s agency. Lu Han, Kris Wu are basically the top of the hot trending artist.
The real harm to this is when the artist has no talent but being sought after by movie and drama makers and offer them roles when they don’t have the talent to back it up. And even if they fail at said roles, they have no incentive to improve their acting because they have the massive fans behind them, and they are relevant and hot, and sought after, so who care?! And even with such fails, they are continued to being offered roles (example AB).
@littlefish oh so it’s the agency’s fault. The artists aren’t personally done by them.
I guess that kinda sucks. It’s harming us, the audience lol
That website might just be making those numbers up themselves. Only Instagram have the most accurate algorithm to determine if any accounts are fake and they will eventually delete them.
It’s a known fact that followers on wb and ig can be “bought”, so this article isn’t a surprise. Btw I didn’t know that 陳國峰 ‘s English name is Penny. Isn’t that a female name? Perhaps he mistook it for Perry lol.