Did Newt Gingrich Buy Most of His Twitter Followers?

GOP candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has had one consolation during his faltering Presidential campaign: the size of his Twitter following.

His account, @Newtgingrich, is currently followed by more than 1.3 million users — a very impressive number, especially compared to GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, who has yet to reach 63,000 followers.

But now there’s more trouble for Newt, as one of his former staffers is alleging that the candidate paid various “follow agencies” to create fake accounts that follow him. “Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them,” the anonymous staffer told Gawker. “If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated.”

The staffer alleges that 80% of Newt’s followers — more than a million accounts, in other words — fall under the heading of fake.

You can test out the theory yourself by looking at Newt’s followers here. At time of writing, for example, three of the first six followers are accounts that have never tweeted, have no profile photo or biographical information, and have a very small number of followers themselves. The picture looks a little better for Newt when you examine the first 100 of his followers listed by Twitter: just 25% meet those criteria, a far cry from 80%. (That said, we have our doubts about plenty of accounts that meet just two of those criteria, such as “Angus Jack McFaux”.)

We look forward to a more thorough analysis from anyone with the time to scan all of Newt’s 1.3 million Twitter followers.

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