What is audience quality?
Audience quality is how much of an account’s following and engagement comes from real, active people, and is used to spot bought followers and faked engagement. Each data tool calculates it differently, and the result is an estimate, not a verdict.
Also known as: Fake follower check, Audience authenticity, AQS, 受众质量
Audience quality answers one question: how much of an account’s following and engagement is real. The common signals for judging an account are on Who we work with; this entry covers how data tools calculate it and how the law treats fake followers. In Chinese it is 受众质量 (shòuzhòng zhìliàng).
How do data tools assess audience quality?
What follows is each vendor’s own description; their methods are not public, and their scores do not convert into each other.
- HypeAuditor’s Audience Quality Score (AQS) runs from 1 to 100 and combines 15 metrics in four groups: engagement rate, the share of quality audience, anomalies in follower and following growth, and comment authenticity. The vendor calls AQS a high-level score to be read with the detailed metrics in its report.1 It also says fraud detection is probabilistic, not perfect.2
- As of September 2026, Modash’s fake-follower detection is available for Instagram only: accounts that follow more than 1,500 others count as “mass followers”; the vendor suggests choosing creators with less than 25% fake followers and avoiding accounts with more than 50%; where a creator hides the follower list, it cannot calculate accurately.3
How does the law treat buying and selling fake followers?
A US Federal Trade Commission rule, 16 CFR § 465.8, in force since October 21, 2024, bars buying or selling indicators of social media influence, such as followers, views and likes, that the person knew or should have known to be fake and that misrepresent influence for a commercial purpose.4 China’s rules on faked engagement are on Who we work with.
Further reading
- How MVP chooses who it works with: Who we work with
Notes
- What is AQS (Audience Quality Score) and how is it calculated?
- HypeAuditor fake followers detection — how it works?
- Fake followers 101: Understanding audience quality
- Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials