A study by social media company Status People has suggested that nearly three quarters of Gaga's followers are not real but are instead either inactive or have been created by spamming computers known as "bots".

Status People's research tool separates Twitter followers into three categories – fake, inactive and good - with company executive Rob Waller explaining to the Guardian: "A fake account is set up to follow people or send out spam. They normally have no followers, but follow large numbers of people.

"An inactive account is one in which there has been no activity for a while. They could be real people, but we would describe them as consumers of information rather than sharers of information," he added. "A good account is everything that remains."

The New York Times, meanwhile, also states that Twitter followers can be purchased online to boost a public figure or company's popularity, Although there is no evidence to suggest that Gaga purchased large swathes of her followers, Status People's research showed that out of the singer's last 100,000 followers, only 29 per cent were considered to fall into the "good" category.



Other fake followers:
75% Rihanna
73% Britney Spears
74% Katy Perry
71% Lady GaGa
64% Nicki Minaj
61% Justin Bieber
50% Madonna

http://www.nme.com/news/lady-gaga/65786

They may wanna look into the fake Facebook likes too

Since when Madonna has a twitter?

I don't know her twitter name, but she has twitter. Look it up

How many followers does Beyonce have?

So that means Justin Bieber is actually the most followed person (by real and active accounts) not Gaga?

The 4 top girls on Twitter, no? But the girls can't use as an excuse because Gaga has one of the lowest fake twitter user percentages. If it was calculated she'd still have the most real followers.

A little over 5.2 million, but she rarely tweets. She aint got time to waste to get fake followers. What's the point?

This is fake, sorry, guys. I don't believe this.

wow is this possible?

Yes, it's quite possible. Stars and companies do this all the time.

madonna is on twitter?

i really thought there were more fake followers.

Not to mention, politicians

Most peopke I know barely use twitter. It's probably just inactive accounts because twitters basic and people would rather use Facebook.

Haha, I still don't know the twitter name of Madonna, please, someone give it 2 me?

"Fake followers" is a bit misleading when they're talking about spam bots and inactive accounts.

A lot of people will join Twitter to see what the fuss is about and maybe follow some of the suggested users before getting bored and not signing back in for months on end, or if they do sign in it's not to tweet but to follow...so are deemed "inactive".

They're still legit people at the end of the day who wanted to follow these celebrities, so it's arguably irrelevant how active they are on the site because they're still real followers.

Go through a few pages of each artists twitter and count how many people have the twitter Egg as their avi. That should give you a rough idea of the number of fake accounts on there.

It's easy to make a fake twitter account because you need such little time and information. Facebook accounts take time and effort to make so fake ones are less common.

https://twitter.com/madonnamdnaday

This was it but it had all it's followers/tweets deleted and it's been de-authenticated. She only used it for like two days to promote MDNA. She should've kept it, her tweets were funny/shady and it was interesting to have some insight into her life.

I wanna know who creates all these accounts.

Who knew NME would have spilled it like that! This is interesting.