Newt Gingrich is making a lot of hay about his one million Twitter followers, casting himself as a well-loved man of the people against whom the mainstream press conspires. However, an unsourced “former staffer” quote in Gawker claims that Gingrich’s Twitter followers came from sleazy tricks like creating fake identities:
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. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater.
About 80 percent of those 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. 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?
Most of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Are Fake