The Kerfluffle Over Newt Gingrich and His Allegedly Fake Twitter Followers

Newt Gingrich once sat atop the political pyramid as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and leader of the 1994 Republican Revolution.

Now he's running for the Republican nomination for president, and he's involved in a big debate about whether many of his 1.3 million Twitter followers are fake.

This may seem like a silly issue.

Yet there's nothing silly about it for Gingrich, his campaign or the campaigns of candidates like Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachman or Jon Huntsman, all of whom would love to have Gingrich drop out of the race and get his percentage of the vote. The more candidates on the stage, the tougher it is to challenge the front-runner, even if that front-runner only has 20 or 30 percent of the vote.

Gingrich himself made his Twitter following an issue. He told The Marietta Daily Journal, "It turned out I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined."

Why could a debate about a social media web site be a nail in the coffin of Gingrich's campaign? Because it meshes with the narrative the national press and pundits are already buying about Gingrich's run for the White House.

The press and pundits kept waiting for Gingrich to show that he was truly a front-runner, either by vaulting to the top of the polls, raising scads of campaign cash or doing something otherwise spectacular.

The only interesting things that happened to his campaign up to the Twitter kerfluffle, however, were interesting because they were bad.

His campaign staff essentially quit, en masse, after Gingrich went on a European cruise with this third wife instead of staying in the states to raise money and hit the rubber chicken dinner circuit like the other presidential hopefuls.

Pundits began speculating, on the air and in the ink, that Gingrich didn't have the fire in his belly to truly run for president. Maybe he was simply running to get attention to his ideas, his books or the political groups he runs.

Boasting about Twitter followers who turn out to be fake would fit into this narrative and prove to the pundits that his campaign was a hollow shell and not true competition to top-tier candidates like Romney, Perry and Bachmann.

Now, there's no doubt that every public figure with a Twitter account has spambots and fake accounts who follow them.

If you're Lady Gaga with more than 12  million followers, how many people do you want to hire, full-time, to police your account and delete spambots and fake accounts? You'd need an army.

Even normal people have fake accounts following them.

But this is important to Gingrich and his campaign.

Reporters didn't have the people to comb through 1.3 million accounts to determine whether a greater-than-average number of followers were spam accounts or shells created by campaign workers to boost numbers.

Outside groups did the job for them.

PoltiFact Georgia also examined his Twitter followers. They studied 1,000 of them and found a good number -- 27 percent -- had no photo, no Tweets on record and minimal or missing profile information.

PeekYou, a startup in the field of media analytics, used its computer power and algorithms to separate real accounts from fake.

Real accounts out tweet and respond to people who tweet back. Fake accounts created by campaign workers -- or whoever -- would get created, follow a few people and lie dormant.

The company reported that it wasn't just a few stray spam accounts and fakes.

PeekYou said that 92 percent of Gingrich's 1.3 million followers were robots and fake accounts, with only 8 percent of them being human beings.

That would be 106,055 actual followers on Twitter with heartbeats and brains, not 1.3 million.

And that's not good for the public image of Gingrich or his campaign.