Ironically, It Ends With Us seems to be a never-ending saga, as the battle continues with new discoveries rising daily. It appears to be heading toward a very public trial, which will ultimately decide its fate. With so much at stake for both parties, the world is eagerly watching to see what happens next.
At this point, things aren’t looking great for Blake Lively. The fight to protect her public image has already taken a toll, financially, mentally, and emotionally. With everything at risk, one would think follower count would be the least of her concerns, right? Well, not quite.
As Lively’s numbers plummet and Justin Baldoni’s soar, other than that it also weakens an argument Lively has long fought for. Here is what it really means!
Blake Lively’s followers are vanishing while Justin Baldoni’s keep rising!
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s legal feud is yet to take the court but it’s already unraveling in real-time on social media, and the numbers tell a story of their own.
Since the drama began, Lively has lost a whopping 864,085 and counting Instagram followers, while Baldoni has gained 230,896 and counting, according to a Daily Mail report citing data from QR Code Generator as the source.
For context, Lively’s follower count now stands at 44.7 million, meaning she’s down about 2%, while Baldoni, now at 4.2 million, has seen a 5% boost. Now why people are hitting the follow or unfollow is not lost on anybody.
Lively’s public image has taken a hit throughout this mess. She briefly regained some support after filing her complaint last Christmas, but all of that faded when Baldoni hit back in the new year.
Even before the legal drama, she wasn’t exactly winning fans over. Many criticized her for being so ignorant about the film’s serious subject matter while promoting it amongst many other things. But Lively later claimed the backlash was part of a smear campaign orchestrated by Baldoni, hence her legal action. She also accused him of s*xual harassment on set.
How does the follower battle weaken one of Lively’s strongest arguments against Baldoni?
One of Blake Lively’s key claims against Justin Baldoni has been that he orchestrated a smear campaign against her, allegedly using bot farms to manipulate what people online thought of her. However, now that the rapid decrease in Instagram followers is starting to catch people’s attention, some argue that this very claim is starting to fall apart.
X user Ariadna Jacob weighed in on the situation, arguing, that bots don’t just wake up one day, collectively decide they’re “over “ someone, and start unfollowing en masse, people do. The fact that Lively has lost nearly a million followers suggests that real people and not automated bot accounts, are actively choosing to hit the unfollow button.
Jacob also pointed out that bot farms are typically used to inflate engagement, not to cause massive follower drops. At most, bots could have been used to amplify negative attention toward the drama, but they wouldn’t simply erase almost a million followers overnight, that kind of drop can’t be faked.
This puts Lively’s legal team in a tricky position. If they continue to argue that Baldoni used bot farms against her as a part of the smear campaign, they may have to explain how these so-called bots suddenly developed free will and started acting like real, opinionated users on the app. With numbers that suggest otherwise, pushing this claim might do more harm than good to Lively’s case.
At the end of the day, while social media isn’t the courtroom, ALL of this is to restore the public image of the parties involved, and thus, naturally, the public perception matters the most here, and right now, the numbers aren’t working in Lively’s favor.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
