Pakistanis 'want' LA to host 2024 Olympics

An unusual level of support was also seen in Bangladesh

Apparently, Pakistanis are very supportive of American city Los Angeles’ bid to host the 2024 Olympics. The campaign reached a million likes on Facebook and as of last week, more than 90,000 of these likes had come from Pakistani Facebook users.

A majority of likes for LA2024 have come only in the last few weeks and oddly enough, from users not based in the United States, according to The Associated Press which had commissioned a report from Socialbakers, a Prague-based firm.

“The fan growth evolution for the LA2024 Facebook page does seem suspicious,” Michaela Branova, an analyst for the firm, adding that fan likes from countries as far away as Pakistan and Bangladesh suddenly spiked in February from almost zero to thousands within a few days.



However, Jeff Millman, the spokesperson for the LA Olympics campaign said the figures were not suspicious. LA began a series of advertisements in the beginning of February and although Millman didn’t elaborate on the scale of the ads, he did say they were “more efficient in countries where there are fewer competing brands."

He said it made sense to reach out to international fans.  “We are a global campaign, as the Olympic movement is global,” said Millman.

Socialbakers’ report provides insights into the social media campaigns being run by LA and Paris, the two cities in competition for the bid to host the 2024 summer games.

As per the report, by the end of 2016, nearly all of LA’s 209,000 Facebook likes had come from within the US, while 80 percent of Paris’s 62,000 Facebook likes had come from France.

But by last week, fans of both campaigns had grown. Paris’s Facebook page followers had tripled in number. Four out of every five likes had come from within the country while the remaining had originated in Tunisia or Algeria, former French colonies. Similarly, support for LA came by the thousands from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Indonesia, Egypt, India, Afghanistan and other low-income countries.

The highest spike came from Bangladesh, according to Socialbakers’ research. Within a month-and-a-half alone, supporters of LA’s bid to host the games had risen from a few dozen to 113,335. Similarly, the number of Pakistani supporters rose from just 55 to 99,336 within the same time period.



More than 700,000 of the 1 million LA 2024 Facebook page likes had occurred in the last six weeks, helping the American city push past the Paris 2024 Facebook page which has about 235,000 likes. The timing couldn’t be better for LA. On Tuesday, an Olympics conference began in Denmark, the first of three such events between now and September, when the International Olympic Committee is scheduled to pick a city among the two competitors.

Socialbakers maintained that it isn’t working for any of the cities in the Olympic bid. Spokeswoman Claire Wilson said the data they used is publically available and taken from Facebook’s data interface, API.

Branova, the firm’s analyst and outside experts agree that it was possible that the social media support for LA grew as a result of advertisements.

“It's consistent with what you’d expect to see from paid endorsements,” said Daniel Mochon, who teaches social media marketing at Tulane University's A. B. Freeman School of Business in the US. “They tend to come from developing countries ... You're going to see sudden spikes that are not necessarily tied to anything external."

This article originally appeared on AP