Most of Newt Gingrich's Twitter Followers Are Fake, Report Suggests

(NewsCore) - ATLANTA, Ga. -- Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has boasted about his 1.3 million-strong following on Twitter, but a report out Monday suggested a majority of his virtual flock is fake.

"I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined," Gingrich told the Marietta Daily Journal in an interview published Sunday. He was discussing a Politico report that chalked up the former House Speaker's Twitter success -- he has more than twice as many followers as the social media-savvy Sarah Palin -- to his "personal touch" since he "tweets and manages his Twitter feed himself."

But a former staffer told Gawker that Gingrich, 68, employs agencies that generate fake accounts en masse and that only 10 percent of his followers are genuine -- a claim denied by the Gingrich camp.

"About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various 'follow agencies,'" the unnamed staffer said, adding that "another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves."

The staffer told Gawker that "the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich," pointing out that simply scrolling through his list of followers shows that most of them suspiciously have no personal information, no followers, no posts and odd user names, suggesting they were mass-generated.

Gingrich's campaign denied the report, with his spokesman R.C. Hammond telling the National Review Online it is "a false accusation which will hurt the feelings of 1.3 million people. #rude."

Following a rocky campaign launch riddled with gaffes and staff defections, Gingrich has seen a plunge in popularity and garners just 4.8 percent support among Republicans nationwide, according to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls.