We all know Elon Musk is leading the charge against the fake accounts on Twitter, and it’s drawn a lot of thoughts and criticisms about how it could affect the platform. What I’m sure most of us haven’t thought about throughout this is, “how will this affect the social media following of my favorite sports team?” Fortunately, the guys over at Gambling.com worried about that for us and crunched the numbers.

The results show that if you root for the Flyers or the Eagles, you’re most likely to notice a big difference if Elon Musk gets his way:

• Highest Number of Fake Followers: Philadelphia Eagles = 1.67 million
• Highest Percentage of Fake Followers: Philadelphia Flyers = 49.6%

But it’s not just Philadelphia teams expecting a massive drop in followers. According to the data, Pittsburgh teams also stand to lose some serious followers due to these fake accounts being deactivated. However, based on the calculations, one team from Allegheny County would like wind up as the most followed team in the state once the dust settles on Elon Musk’s newly purchased platform.

Here is the breakdown of total followers vs. fake followers:

All teams sorted by percentage of fake followers sees the Flyers and Eagles in the top 2 spots:

Finally, the projected follower counts post-crackdown sees the Steelers as the new most-followed team:

If you’re curious as to how these numbers were calculated, I’ll drop the methodology of the study below. Even so, I’ll save you the time and explain exactly how these fake followers came from and how critical it is for Elon Musk to rid the platform of them, even though he is the cringiest man alive.

My theory is as follows. Of course, there will always be a number of bot accounts following massive brands like sports teams because it lends them legitimacy.

That said, I think the contentious electoral landscape that is Pennsylvania led operatives from both parties – as well as any foreign government with an interest in our elections – to create bot accounts to drum up support for their chosen candidate.

There were Fetterman operatives on Broad Street handing out “Phillies Fans 4 Fetterman” immediately after the team won the NLCS over the San Diego Padres. Plus, I have no doubts there were some pro-Mastriano/Oz Russian bots following the Eagles and Steelers accounts to shift the political conversation in that direction as well.

This was the most expensive senate race in the country this election cycle. Do you really mean to tell me none of that money went into Twitter bots? Come on people, it’s 2022, not 1920. Billboards only cost so much.

Regardless of how these fake accounts came to be, I couldn’t care less if they stay or go. Sure, Elon Musk can get rid of them, but I find the braindead real people on the app ten times more annoying and difficult to escape than any bot or fake account.

Honestly, any time spent on Twitter at all is a loss regardless of whether it’s owned by Elon Musk or the Dalai Lama; it will always be totally devoid of anything close to reality but will be treated like the real world. Until we can stop that, I don’t care what else goes down.

Here’s how Gambling.com arrived at these numbers:

To collect the data, Gambling.com ran the twitter accounts of Pennsylvania’s major league sports teams through SparkToro’s fake follower audit tool. This took a sample of 2,000 random follower and ran diagnostics found to strongly correlate with these types of fake followers (bots, spam accounts, inactive users, propaganda, or other non-engaged/non-real users).

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