Of course, Cristiano Ronaldo doesn’t care exactly how many people end up following him on social media. So the news that Instagram is now over 500 million wasn’t a big deal for him. At least not as big as the fact that the high-tech ball at the World Cup dared to claim not to have been touched by Ronaldo’s hair – and the goal against Uruguay was attributed to a teammate. What matters to Cristiano Ronaldo is that Cristiano Ronaldo loves him. Basically, it must be said: May every person find someone who will love them as Cristiano Ronaldo is loved by Cristiano Ronaldo.
There are currently 507 million accounts subscribed to Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagram channel. He is the social media star of this World Cup, which is officially taking place in Qatar. However, because many football fans around the world agree that you really don’t have to go to Qatar to watch football – which is why Qatar is stuffing people in participant shirts who most certainly didn’t travel from those countries – this is one too Social Media World Cup. And since the number of followers decides on success.
“The best live experience is on Twitter,” said Elon Musk. A bold statement that should not be taken too seriously. Of course, Musk was advertising his own company, and on the other hand: May everyone find someone who thinks they are as great as Elon Musk is found great by Elon Musk.
According to Musk, one of Musk’s most important missions on Twitter: the removal of so-called bot accounts, i.e. those that are not filled with content by humans but by machines. Something has to be done about that, he says. And to do that, you have to find out how many of these bots there are – whether on Twitter, Instagram or other networks.
The Company Scam.Info has that with the fake account analysis tool Modash done, she made lists and divided them into celebrity categories: Who has the most bots followers? In first place of the World Cup kickers: Cristiano Ronaldo. A good quarter of his subscribers on Instagram are robots. Lionel Messi has 86.6 out of 372 million accounts and Kylian Mbappé has 15.1 out of 73.2 million. That’s more Mbappé fakes than Thomas Müller actually has subscribers: 11.8 million, 28 percent of them fake.
The top three non-football celebrities by percentage: model Gigi Hadid (28.9), musician Justin Timberlake (29.2), Hadid’s sister Bella (30.8). The wonderfully funny influencer Khabi Lame, on the other hand, has just 14 percent fakes. In absolute numbers across all celebrity categories, singer Selena Gomez is third (93.8 million); ahead of her are entrepreneur Kylie Jenner (101.3 million) and of course Cristiano Ronaldo with his 124.8 million fake followers.
The question is, of course, whether Cristiano Ronaldo is interested in this analysis. If one thing is certain about Ronaldo since the embarrassing goal debate at the World Cup, it is this: What is real and what is fake, whether goals or fans, only Cristiano Ronaldo’s opinion counts for Cristiano Ronaldo on this question.