Are Lady Gaga's followers 'fake'?

Lady Gaga has almost 30 million followers on Twitter, but are they for real? In a report in The Guardian last week, a British start-up, alleged that only 29% of Gaga's followers are legit.

The company, Status People, claims to have devised a tool for rooting out fake and inactive Twitter accounts which are being used to inflate the number of followers on certain accounts.

So is Lady Gaga really faking it? Well, it's likely, but she probably doesn't even know it. It's unlikely a celeb of Gaga's status is managing her own social media accounts, which means a publicist or agent has probably recruited a few extra followers on her behalf.

According to E!, social media experts say these accounts can be bots or a group of zombie accounts created by clever programmers. "Those zombie accounts can then be ordered to follow a sweet of Twitter accounts that make them look like a certain demographic - say, young moms or teen metal fans."

If the report is true, Lady Gaga may have closer to 9 million real followers. Yup, that's 9 big ones. Doesn't sound like a figure that needs much inflating to us!