The two Formula 1 drivers with the most phony Twitter followings are Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. Their millions of fictitious followers make up the enormous followings they purport to have on Elon Musk’s platform.
In the midst of a crisis of online abuse and fake news that frequently originates on social media platforms, where agitators spin out-of-control “reports” to blur reality from fiction as well as incite factions that have emerged in Formula One in recent years to spew their own abusive narrative protected by IP addresses and social media giants with little desire to address the issues, gambling.com conducted a study to determine the true nature of Twitter followers.
Verstappen and Hamilton are both well aware of the problems with social media; they have both spoken out against the evil of abuse and recommended that social media companies clean up their networks.
They are not alone, as Lando Norris, George Russell, Nicholas Latifi, Charles Leclerc, and Carlos Sainz have all expressed their worries about the harm that hate speech and online abuse cause to the sport and its participants, not to mention society at large.
While F1 as a whole is struggling to join the fight against digital maggots that infest every sport and nearly every aspect of modern life, a hostile minority sabotaging social media’s enormous potential for the majority, the FIA is leading the cyber-war with high-tech tools.
In order to determine which Formula One drivers and teams have the most phony Twitter followers, the gambling.com research team employed the following methodology to reach their findings:
- SparkToro was used by Gambling.com to analyze each F1 driver’s and team’s Twitter accounts.
Bots, spam accounts, inactive users, propaganda, and other non-engaged/non-real users are among the types of fake followers that their tool can identify using a sample of 2,000 randomly selected followers and diagnostics.
Because Sebastian Vettel does not have a Twitter account, he was excluded from the study. - Lastly, the percentage of phony followers for each driver and team was ranked from highest to lowest.
The ranking was based on who had the most fake followers when two drivers or teams had the same percentage of fake followers.
Results of the F1 Fake Followers study established the following:
At 43.2%, Max Verstappen has the most fake followers, followed closely by Mick Schumacherat 43.1%.
With nearly three million (37.5%) phony followers, Lewis Hamilton has the most of any one person. Second place goes to Sergio Pérez, who has more than 1.4 million.
McLaren has the greatest proportion of phony followers among racing teams. Alfa Romeo is in third place (42.3%), followed by Red Bull (43%).
Mercedes has the most fake followers out of all the teams, despite having the fourth-highest percentage. With 1,866,293 in total, they are nearly 50,000 more than Red Bull, who came in second.
The racing team with the most phony Twitter followers is McLaren. An estimated 44.6% of their followers are thought to be fake.
Elon Musk took over Twitter and launched a campaign against phony accounts after tweeting: “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” according to the gambling.com report.
In what is arguably the only sane declaration of war against this cancer, Musk went on to say that “any name change at all would compel the temporary loss of a verified checkmark,” paywalling all social media to permanently remove it.
With so many phony followers on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, Twitter is not alone.
This gambling.com/SparkToro study highlights Twitter, which is currently under Musk’s control and is actively coming clean after letting the digital maggots fester for years.
However, it is important to note that fake accounts are just as common, if not more so, on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. As Musk is doing on Twitter, it is time for the social networks and their billionaire owners to join forces in this very public cyberwar.
Social media will need to focus on quality verified followers in order to survive in the future, rather than numbers that ultimately mean nothing and serve as platforms for keyboard warriors to vent their annoyances without regard for the harm they may cause. In fact, getting off on hate seems to be a common trait among digital maggots.
Hamilton suggested we all disconnect from the platforms, while Verstappen emphasized that social media powerhouses need to clean up their act and calm the chaos. Both of our champions had good suggestions.