Yeh but I still wanna know more about Martin, Shirl
To be fair, Martin is ripped as hell but about 5ft 4. His wife is fucking terrifying.
So how do these fake followers get added to accounts? Are they the ones that have Russian and Arabic names usually with a profile pic of a plant? Or where they have an English first name like Dave or Emily but surname will be completely foreign and will be a random glamour model pic? Does Insta recognise it and delete them? Girl I work with has gone from 800 to 5300 in a week and she also periodically goes private, each pic has about 60 likes. Really curious to how it all works.
So, you can buy them online two ways: you can buy a big bundle (the cheaper option), or you can pay for a service that drip feeds new followers to your account, which 9/10 times falls under the algorithm radar. The accounts are either one person operating with a software that can support thousands of fake accounts at once, or they're actual accounts owned by users, mainly Arabic and Eastern European, who get paid something like 2p per follow.
Instagram can't tell who's fake per se, but it monitors how many people interact with your account. Using mine for example, I have about 9k followers. I average 800-2000 likes per post, with anything from 50-150 comments. So, even though I haven't loads of followers, my content gets pushed heavily by insta because my engagement rate is high. If you've bought say, 100k followers, but you're only getting 100 likes per post with 5 or 6 comments, the algorithm knows what you're doing and shadow bans you. This means your content doesn't show on the discovery page, nor does it show in hashtag searches.
Even if you're not shadow banned, the other issue is that insta only shows your content to people who list your sort of page as an interest, or regularly click on posts similar to yours. So, let's say Jeff buys the real followers who are clicking for pennies, it's unlikely they list cunt mugs as an interest or regularly click on pics of hairy fanny pens. So insta shows her content to people with no interest in what she does, hence the drop in engagement.
There is a software that can detect the likelihood of false followers: my agent uses it on all of us, as do many big brands. If you've got a lot of fake followers, they might take a punt and throw you £50 and free product for the post, but ya girl Shirl doesn't post for anything less than £750 a pop. Buying followers is false economy and only works for major influencers like Kim K, who may have several million fake followers, but the hundreds of thousands of real ones drive enough traffic to insta for Zuckerberg to turn a blind eye.
Phew
She could spend all her dollar behind the bar, you know being as the entertainment industry is on its arse after this past year 
