"It's all about manipulation": Kjersti Flaa questions Blake Lively's Instagram empire, claims "75 to 95%" followers are fake

Entertainment journalist Kjersti Flaa shared her thoughts on Blake Lively’s massive Instagram presence during the September 1, 2025, episode of her YouTube podcast, Flaawsome Talk with Kjersti Flaa. During the discussion, Flaa claimed that a large portion of Lively’s 42.8 million followers were not genuine.

"Blake Lively has about 1 to 5 million real followers, not 42.8 million. Yeah, it’s all about manipulation, you guys," Flaa remarked.

Kjersti Flaa then explained how she first began looking into the matter. She revealed that she had casually browsed through both Blake Lively’s and Ryan Reynolds’ Instagram profiles, which led her to question their follower bases on Instagram.

"I don’t know what got me there, but then I started looking at their followers and I realized I was going through them, and almost like 80% of their followers seem to be like bot accounts," she explained.

The journalist elaborated on the characteristics of these alleged fake followers. As she checked a few of the accounts that followed both Lively and Reynolds, she noticed they all looked the same. She claimed that most of them “didn’t even have a profile picture,” all of them were “following 20 people,” and none of them “had any posts.” These similarities led her to realize that the accounts were typical bot accounts.

Kjersti Flaa then turned her attention to engagement rates, an important metric in the social media world.

According to Sprout Social, Instagram engagement rate measures how actively an account’s followers interact with its content, through likes, comments, shares, and saves, using the formula (total engagement divided by total followers) × 100.

To illustrate Blake Lively’s engagement rate, Flaa pointed out that the average for celebrities was about 1 to 3%. She then broke down the numbers to calculate engagement on the Gossip Girl alum’s posts and remarked that her rate was quite low.

“Let’s look at Blake Lively. She has 42.8 million followers, and her average likes per post (over) the last six months has been around 40,000 to 200,000 likes. That gives Blake an average engagement rate from 0.1% to 0.5%…That suggests that at least 75 to 95% of Blake’s followers are inactive or fake,” Flaa said.

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What else did Kjersti Flaa say about Blake Lively’s Instagram followers?

Blake Lively (Image via Getty Images)

In the aforementioned podcast episode, Kjersti Flaa claimed that both Blake Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had built a large portion of their Instagram following through bot farms.

To explain the concept to her listeners, Kjersti Flaa first broke down what bot farms were in simple terms. She described them as setups where groups of people managed hundreds of fake accounts across multiple phones.

"These are kind of sophisticated factories… where a lot of people sit and have about 100 to 1,000 phones that they administer. On their phones, they have a certain number of Instagram accounts that they follow, like, and comment on, and that’s how some people make a living," she explained.

She further argued that many celebrities rely on such methods to appear more popular on social media than they actually are. According to her, both Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds were particularly benefiting from this setup and “keeping a lot of people” in the bot farms “busy.”

To give her listeners a more in-depth comparison, Kjersti Flaa brought up Taylor Swift’s Instagram presence.

Flaa emphasized that among Swift’s 282 million followers, most appeared to be authentic. She explained that Swift’s engagement rate, averaging 6 to 10 million likes per post, came to around 2 to 3.5%. This was a strong engagement rate for celebrity accounts like Swift’s.

In contrast, she claimed Lively’s engagement rate was far lower, ranging between 0.1% and 0.5%, indicating that the majority of Lively’s followers were fake.

"If she were at Taylor’s engagement level, she would be pulling millions of likes. And then I looked at her likes...Half of her likes are fake as well, which means that her engagement rate is even lower," Kjersti Flaa remarked.

The podcaster also encouraged her audience to look into the accounts for themselves. She added that if one were to examine the followers on either Blake Lively’s or Ryan Reynolds’ accounts, it would be so “obvious that most of these people don’t exist.”

She also reiterated that many of these bot accounts that allegedly engaged with celebrity Instagram profiles were operated via “a factory somewhere in Russia or somewhere in Asia,” where workers clicked likes and followed celebrities to boost the numbers.

"And the thing is, Instagram doesn't pick this up as bots because they're actually from real phones with real accounts. But now you know the real truth about Blake and Ryan's Instagram," Kjersti Flaa said.

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Entertainment journalist Kjersti is currently busy with her podcast, Flaawsome Talk with Kjersti Flaa.

Blake Lively, on the other hand, is embroiled in a legal battle with her It Ends With Us director and co-star, Justin Baldoni. The trial for her lawsuit is scheduled for March 9, 2026.