Instagram Has 24 Million Fake Accounts, Which Seems Like A Lot

How many spambots do you think are on Instagram?

30,000? Way off.

700,000? Not even close.

Four million? Nope.

Give up? Or perhaps you just read the headline and already knew the answer before even clicking the link?

Turns out there are approximately 24 million fake Instagram accounts, as discovered by security researchers for a study set to be published next week.

That's right. There are apparently more spambots on Instagram than real human people that live in Australia.

According to The Huffington Post, the researchers examined 10 milllion Instagram accounts and found a whopping 29.9 per cent of them were totally inactive. A further 7.9 per cent acted as spambots (meaning they were created in “online black markets” and sold off to those who want to inflate their follower list with dummy accounts).

Buying followers is in direct violation of Instagram’s terms and conditions, but this study shows it’s not such a difficult rule to flaunt.

(Worth noting that, at 300 million monthly active users, a study of 10 million accounts means only about three per cent of total accounts were measured.)

If you want to avoid spambots, the study says you can weed them out by finding which of your followers have almost no uploads or followers themselves, but are following more than 1,000 accounts. (This seems pretty obvious.)

Otherwise, set your account to Private. This will at least keep your photos from being snagged by these pesky spambots. All 24 million of them.