Former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight champion Conor McGregor, who also held gold at 145 pounds, is one of the most popular mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters on Twitter, boasting upward of 9.6 million followers.
Nearly half of them are fake.
That’s according to a recent audit from Gambling.com, by way of SparkToro.com, which indicated that “Notorious” is carrying an estimated 4,081,338 fake followers (42.3 percent). Former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva placed second with 2,849,671 phony fans (38 percent).
Here’s the complete list:
Conor McGregor: 9,600,000 followers, 4,081,338 fake (42.3%)
Anderson Silva: 7,500,000 followers, 2,849,671 fake (38%)
Jon Jones: 2,700,000 followers, 1,092,496 fake (40.3%)
Georges St-Pierre: 2,100,000 followers, 871,548 fake (41.5%)
Nate Diaz: 2,100,000, 820,040 fake (38.3%)
Khabib Nurmagomedov: 2,100,000, 756,021 fake (36.6%)
Daniel Cormier: 1,400,000 followers, 517,512 fake (37%)
Israel Adesanya: 1,400,000 followers, 489,443 fake (34.4%)
Dustin Poirier: 985,000, 362,448 fake (36.8%)
Cody Garbrandt: 361,000, 176,366 fake (48.8%)
Judging strictly by percentage of fake followers to real followers, former UFC bantamweight champion Cody Garbrandt leads the list at 48.8% (176,366 of 361,100), followed by fellow ex-champion TJ Dillashaw at 48.1% (177,564 of 369,000), Conor McGregor at 42.3% (4,081,338 of 9,600,000), Georges St-Pierre at 41.5% (871,548 of 2.100,000), and Justin Gaethje at 40.9% (245,453 of 600,000).
Elon Musk is now in charge of Twitter and the Tesla boss pledged to rid the social media platform of pesky bots and spam accounts by any means necessary. How or when that digital cleansing takes place remains to be seen, but it sounds like some of the biggest names in UFC will be affected.