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Half of Justin Bieber’s followers are fake, report says

Lady Gaga holds the title of Most Twitter Followers once again

Justin Bieber used to have the most Twitter followers of anyone in the world. But a new report says more than 50 per cent of his followers are fake, which means that the 19-year-old Canadian pop star only has the second most Twitter followers of anyone in the world.

According to the website Social Bakers, which monitors and tracks social networks for social media stats and metrics purposes, only 17.8 million of Bieber’s 37.3 million followers are linked to real accounts. That means only 47 per cent of his followers are actual ‘Beliebers’.

“The company spots fake accounts by looking at the number of followers and seeing if genuine tweets have been posted, rather than spam,” says the BBC. “The data also considers fake accounts to continuously tweet buzz phrases such as ‘diet’, ‘make money’ and ‘work from home’.”

What does all this mean? It means that Lady Gaga, who Bieber overtook last year for the title of most Twitter followers, is back on top. After one takes into account the number of fake followers she has, Lady Gaga still has 19 million real Twitter followers compared to Bieber’s 17 million.

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