Last December, Instagram said it had purged millions of fake accounts, in an effort to provide more accurate numbers to marketers. Now, Italian security researchers say about 8% of Instagram accounts appear to be run by computer-generated “bots.”
The researchers assessed the likelihood of an account being fake by how often it posted content to the Facebook-owned image-sharing service, and by the ratio of accounts followed to followers. On average, spam-bots followed 41 users for each follower, real users just one for each follower.
