The Fake Side of Reality TV

It’s no secret that appearing on one of the UK’s most popular reality shows can turn you into an overnight celebrity, with many reality TV stars going on to forge successful careers as social media influencers.

Brand partnerships and sponsored posts can be a nice source of income, and appearing on a show such as Love Island is always going to give a nice boost to your follower count.

A high follower count is all well and good, but lots of accounts actually have large portions of ‘fake followers’, whether they be bots, followers that have been paid for, or just dormant accounts. So which of the UK’s most popular reality TV stars have the most ‘fake’ followers?

Filter by Reality TV Show

 All Ex on the Beach Geordie Shore Gogglebox Love Island Made in Chelsea  The Magaluf Weekender  The Only Way is Essex
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Methodology

We used two services to estimate the number of ‘fake’ followers for each person on Instagram and Twitter, each with slightly different methodologies:

For Instagram, we used HypeAuditor. HypeAuditor breaks the audience of each account down into four categories: Real People, Influencers, Mass Followers and Suspicious Accounts.

For each reality star, we took the number of followers deemed to be Mass Followers (accounts with more than 1,500 followings) and Suspicious Accounts (bots and follows that have been paid for).

For Twitter, we used SparkToro’s Fake Followers Audit, which identifies the number of fake followers as “Accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter)”.


More information about the methodology used by both tools can be found on their sites.

Note that we took the 100 UK reality stars with the highest combined followings on Instagram and Twitter and removed any who are only active on one of those platforms.