Update: Only 92% of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Are Fake
Short of direct evidence of follower-buying, there’s not much more we can do to corroborate our source’s claims aside from actually pore over all those 1.3 million followers looking for fakes.
As it turns out, the search firm PeekYou has done just that! And it doesn’t look good for Gingrich. In a happy accident, PeekYou—which is sort of a people-oriented search index—has for the past year been conducting research on how to measure the quality of Twitter audiences, a project that included looking at politicians’ Twitter followers. And by their count, just 8% of Newt Gingrich’s followers are real people.
“We just started running the 2012 candidates’ numbers three weeks ago,” said Josh Mackey, PeekYou’s general manager of business and product development, “and when we saw your story, we went back to pull the Gingrich numbers. The huge majority of his followers are either completely anonymous people who have no other web presence, or they are spambots.”