Research shows that up to 8% of Instagram followers are fake, and their activity is questioned

July 1, 2015 Instagram announced in December last year that it had cleaned up millions of zombie accounts on the platform to provide marketers with more accurate data. However, Italian information security researchers recently reported that about 8% of accounts on Instagram are still "zombies" generated by computers.

The researchers evaluated whether an Instagram account was a bot by measuring how often it posted content and the ratio of followers to followers. On average, bot accounts had a ratio of 41 followers to followers, while healthy accounts had a ratio of 1 to 1.

For social networks, distinguishing between zombie accounts and ordinary users is a perennial issue. Zombie accounts are usually created to artificially increase someone's follower count or promote a product. However, zombie accounts are also detrimental to the experience of ordinary users and may cause them to leave the service.

For example, Facebook Twitter stated in its annual report that in 2014, among the 1.4 billion users who checked their accounts at least once a month, less than 2% were zombie accounts. The report said that less than 5% of its platform accounts are bots, but outside researchers believe the proportion is much higher.

"You can get a lot of things from creating a bot: selling likes, followers, comments, and spamming through trending topics," said Andrea Stropa, one of the report's authors, who has previously studied the bot problem on Twitter.

Instagram, which has more than 300 million monthly active users, declined to comment on the number of bot accounts. The company said it regularly analyzes user activity to weed out bot accounts.

The study tracked the activity of 10.2 million Instagram accounts over a month. The accounts were randomly selected from followers of popular Instagram accounts, including Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, National Geographic and retailer Victoria's Secret.

Stroppa also said that the researchers spent about $100 to buy about 20,000 zombie fans and studied the activities of these accounts. Among them, 71% were considered zombie accounts, but they were equipped with complete information, including name, profile, photos and location. Since registering Instagram, these accounts have shared an average of 6 photos, most of which are from other users. In comparison, normal Instagram users post an average of 55 photos.

The researchers also found that 30% of Instagram users in the sample were inactive, posting only one photo in more than a month or no photos at all. An Instagram spokesperson said the company uses a different definition, which counts users as "active" as long as they log in to the mobile app.

Instagram has gained favor with advertisers because it attracts many young and wealthy users and has a high level of user interaction. In a recent report, Forrester Research said that top brands have found that 4.2% of Instagram fans comment, like or share content, while this proportion is only 0.07% on Facebook. Last week, Mizuho Securities said in a report that large brands spend an average of $350,000 to $1 million per month on advertising on Instagram.

Italian researchers said that despite measures to combat bots, there was clear evidence of widespread bot activity on Instagram. Therefore, statistics on likes and followers could be misleading. "We believe that these indicators of account popularity are fragile and do not deserve excessive attention," the report said.