Newt Gingrich’s Twitter followers are fake, former staffer claims

Social media has already begun to play a strong role in the 2012 presidential election as candidates such as Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney and President Obama have taken their campaigns to Twitter.

Newt Gingrich understands the impact of a strong following, and he's certainly not shy about sharing his impressive numbers -- he currently boasts over 1,300,000 followers while Bachmann and Romney have yet to crack 100,000.

But what's far less impressive is how he went about acquiring his followers. A former staffer, one of many to quit the Gingrich campaign, has spilled the beans, alleging nearly 80 per cent of Gingrich's Twitter followers are fake.

"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," explains the defunct staffer in a Gawker story. "As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater."

Gingrich (@newtgingrich) created his account in 2009, giving him quite the head start in the "Twitter primaries." But that's not exactly why he's miles ahead of his competition.

"It's his personal touch: He tweets and manages his Twitter feed himself," his campaign confirmed in a Politico story. "All told, he has tweeted 2,611 times in the 29 months since he joined the site."

But the whistle-blowing ex-staffer offers a far more plausible explanation.

"About 80 percent of those (Gingrich follower) accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various "follow agencies," another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt's profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn't follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich," the ex-staffer tells 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. Pathetic, isn't it?"