There's a dozen of news reports that have been made public about a number of Arab celebrities buying fans and followers on the world wide web. Tamer Hosny was the guy who got the most heat last year--after calming a million follower most of whom were computer bots.
Here are some hard numbers that are true as of today
- Elissa has 442 thousand followers on Twitter
- Haifa Wahbe has 336 followers on the same network
- Nawal Al Zoghby has 267 thousand
- Nancy Ajram 255 thousand followers
- Najwa Karam has 226 K followers
- Myriam Faris has 147 thousand followers
Few weeks later, we hear more dirt about other Arab celebrities who have been Linked to fake Twitter and Facebook accounts. Najwa Karam had to answer questions about the same subject. Elissa had to deal with increased attacks from Haifa Wahbe fans who have spilled the beans on all the fake followers for the Lebanese diva. Read here in Arabic on Khabar 3ajilThe accusations started with attacks like those followers are not Arab nor they speak Arabic, so why would they be following an Arabic pop star. Others claim such fake fans have no engagement level and no activities online that would indicate they are for real.
Elaph also reported on the scandal, according to a number of companies, you can purchase a 100 thousand followers for about 5 thousands dollars. Nawal Al Zoghby is another singer who has been accused of buying fake fans and followers. Elaph seemed to have done the most research on this topic and they have followed it very closely.
Of course the celebrities are defending themselves against those attacks and accused their foes of being jealous of their success. I think the reality is more complex than that, but it would not be a far fetched scenario for those celebrities to have a mixed bag of fake and real followers.
I can believe that these celebrities are doing that. Just like some celebrities buy back some of there albums and then tell everybody they sold thousands of copies. Unfortunately this type of behavior is going to continue because so many people fall for there tricks. It's all smoke and mirrors, celebrities trying to convince the world that they are popular and cool. They all need to grow up and take that same money they used to buy fans and feed some starving kids.
ReplyDeleteThough I may agree that some of them might be doing some cheating here, I think one of their reasons is retarded: non-arabs following arab artists. I don't speak arab, but I follow some of these artists because I am interested in their music. There is such a thing as google translate. So foreign fans can be deemed as real followers.
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