One would expect that with a NFL franchise relocating to a city of 3.976 million, it’s Twitter Twitter following would jump tremendously with the mass of new fans. The LA Chargers’ account did just that, with only one caveat. All their new “fans” were fake.
Twitter user @calebbmx89 noticed the jump and ran an audit on the account’s following, which revealed 359,611 of the 444,888 followers were indeed not people, but bots, purchased by the team to bolster their account at face value.
Noticed the #LAme @Chargers account had over 800k followers. This seemed like quite a jump from when they 1st moved to LA and had sub 500k. Looked up on a Twitter Audit website and found out almost half of those are fake. @ScottKaplan @jmt619 @DSmithShow @SI_LeeJenkins @Deadspin pic.twitter.com/V1sUBaK0Mm
— Caleb Norman (@CalebBMX89) February 21, 2018
The audit was repeated confirmed by TheBigLead.com with the same results, not that the embarrassingly low activity and interaction on the team’s tweets wasn’t a giveaway to begin with.
For instance a tweet regarding the announcement of season tickets for the upcoming season garnered a mere 4 retweets.
Buying Twitter followers may be the most LA thing ever, so you could say the team is fitting in with their new city well.
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