Los Angeles Lakers fans should be known as some of the best fans in the world. Every season, Lakers fans flood into the Staples Center (well, before March 2020) to support the purple and gold.
From Elgin Baylor to Jerry West to Magic Johnson to Kobe Bryant to LeBron James and every name in-between, the Lakers have been spoiled to have some of the greatest players in league history with the team and that has created quite the fan base as a result.
Trust us: we see every day here at Lake Show Life how many Lakers fans there truly are. We hear you. There is a reason why FanSided named Lakers fans the number one fandom in the world in this year’s FanSided 250.
But according to one recent online study, the Los Angeles Lakers have the fakest online following in the NBA.
Our friends over at Pickswise recently conducted a study to find out which NBA team has the fakest following in the NBA. To do so, they used SparkToro’s fake follower audit tool to determine how many “fake” followers each NBA team had.
The study was conducted using the team’s Twitter accounts.
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And to the surprise of us here at Lake Show Life, the study concluded that the Lakers have a fake follower percentage of 40.5% — the highest in the entire NBA. According to this study, only 59.5% of the Lakers’ 9.6 million followers are considered real.
The next highest fake follower percentage was the Orlando Magic, at 39%. Some other notable teams that Lakers fans may be interested in is the Boston Celtics (35.3% fake followers), Los Angeles Clippers (34.1%) and the New York Knicks (31.7%).
But here is a spin zone for any Lakers fan that feels disrespected by this: the Los Angeles Lakers still have more real followers than all of those teams. Using the numbers from this study, we can conclude that the Lakers have 5.7 million ‘real’ followers, the Celtics have 2.3 million ‘real’ followers, the Clippers have 1.1 million ‘real’ followers and the Knicks have 1.5 million ‘real’ followers.
Heck, the Lakers have more ‘fake’ followers according to this study than some teams have overall followers… and they still have way more ‘real’ followers as well.
The team with the lowest percentage of ‘fake’ followers is the Charlotte Hornets. Only 28.7% of the team’s 1 million followers are deemed to be fake.
Hey, what can we say? The Los Angeles Lakers are so great that even the bots love them. Can’t blame them.