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NBC's Alex Moe
DES MOINES, Iowa -- The Newt Gingrich campaign has denied recent allegations that more than 90% of the former House Speaker’s Twitter followers are not real.
Gingrich’s handle, @newtgingrich, has more than 1.3 million Twitter followers, more than 20 times the number of followers for Mitt Romney, the next closest with more than 63,000 followers. In fact, Gingrich's followers are more than six times the entire field of announced candidates combined and double Twitter star Sarah Palin's number of followers.
Campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond wrote in a statement that Gingrich is not responsible for the legitimacy of his followers.
“Twitter alone is the authority on counting followers and policing their legitimacy," Hammond wrote. "At no time has the campaign or Gingrich Communications employed an outside group to inflate the number of followers of @newtgingrich. Any accusation of the kind is a lie, a smear and unsubstantiated.”
The response comes after a New York based search company, PeekYou, announced yesterday that it had analyzed Gingrich’s followers and found a ‘consumer ratio’ of 8% (or about 106,055 accounts). According to PeekYou, “A Consumer Ratio measures the percentage of a Twitter audience that is identified as a “consumer” or “voter” in Newt’s case, vs business, private/anonymous and spam accounts.”
“We have seen some pretty low ‘Consumer Ratios’ in our testing, but Newt Gingrich’s was the lowest we had ever seen. At first, we actually thought it might have been a bug on our side, but a quick manual look at the data showed our analysis was true,” Michael Hussey, CEO and founder of PeekYou, said on the website.
Ben Smith at Politico reported, per Hussey, "Gingrich's place on Twitter's now-defunct suggested user list was also a good explanation for the data he found." Smith also linked to a Tweet by Hussey, in which he wrote, "@peekyou is not accusing @newtgingrich of buying followers. Spammy followers could be related to being on the suggested user list."
Here is a breakdown as of today of the follower counts for those campaigning (or possibly going to campaign):
@newtgingrich 1,326,122
@MittRomney 63,824
@TeamBachmann 24,205
@JonHuntsman 8,030
@timpawlenty 45,786
@RickSantorum 13,714
@RonPaul 20,008
@THEHermanCain 52,576
@SarahPalinUSA 621,037
@TexGov 13,880
Leave a Comment:
Huh?
Newt's still in the running?
How much in the 'hole' is his campaign this month?
Did Tiffany's get paid?
Newt, isn't that a slimmy little lizard, kind of related to the salamander ?
Hasn't he folded up his campaign yet, or is he still trying to hawk his VHS tapes from the back of the tent.
Hahahahahahahaha........really !!!? Creating fake twitter followers.....what a shmoe.
Hey Bob - guess we got our answer, eh?
Just not up to the task.
In an emphatic denial of the report that 90 percent of Gingrich's Twitter followers are not legitimate, his spokesperson said:
Okay. Consider that admitted. And fire the spokesperson.
But what I want to know is why so many illegal aliens and illegitimate children are following Gingrich.
Sounds like a closet liberal to me.
Of course this is all staged, any attention is better than no attention!
You couldn't even get the dog to play with Newt unless you tied a pork chop around his neck.
I have 9 million twitter followers!
Thanks, Mom.
Anna Molly - I'm not an illegal alien, nor an illegitmate child. I'm a business owner for over 3 decades who plays by the rules, pays my taxes, and expects my government to keep its promises to me and mine. I'm somewhere in the middle politically, although left of center. I can't find a label that describes the varying views I have on issues. No doubt, in your mind I'm a liberal.
Should I have a talk with my parents about who my father really was? I really loved the very good man I believed to be my father. Obviously you must be right so perhaps there's an issue with my birth certificate.
All my way of saying that you're insulting comment reflects on your own ignorance and bias. Grow up.
fiestyredhead you always have such intelligent comments for an 8 year old.
I can see Newt come up with the idea...Everyone wants friends but sometimes you gotta settle for the imaginary ones.
It would be so easy for Newt to prove that these people exist. Check their IP addresses - I'm a twitter virgin but I assume you have to provide an email to create an account. I mean today you can't even look at porn on the web without being automatically bombarded with the Viagra spam. if it's that easy for the Viagra people to find you, Newt should have no problem...
bayllie: now I know you must be not be a Democrat. Viagra adds are only targeted to Republicans because the manufacturer knows what big penis's they are.
dirp101
hehe, I guess they got me confused with one of those penises.
Funny thing is, I keep getting pop ups for Preperation-H, do they know I'm a Democrat ?
Gingrich campaign? Really? He has a campaign?
Y' beat me to it, Dangerfield, GBO and Feisty. I was just thinking the exact same thing. I honestly did not know he was still in the game. (I mean- I didn't know he was still TRYING to be in the game.)
This sounds awfully familiar, fake twitter followers. Wasn't there someone in Alaska who had a similar problem?
Not sure but I think Newt's been in Iowa this week, even the papers aren't paying attention.
Newt is following himself !! LOL
.
The Emperor has no Twitter followers (and is not an Emperor).
Where's Ron Paul?
In the state of Make Believe....
Ron Pauls followers use "Etch-a-Sketch"...
LOL...you ppl are funny :)
Once you get over the image media has cast over Ron Paul, you do some thinking and decide if there is really anything you can disagree with him about. He's about freedom from Federal government interfereing with State level decisions.
Your jokes don't make sense either.
b dune
that is funny!
newt you are such a piece of ss..hit.....flush!!!!! no one in the world is twittering you...no one
Lying, cheating, loser=Newt. He needs to back to his mansion and hide his evil face.
Is it just me, but when ever there is a story about a republican, they never own up to anything. It's never their fault, it is always someone else fault.
You must admit it is better than tweeting your Wiener.
look he is waving at 10 people hahahaha
@dirp101 So Ron Paul is in the state of make believe but Newt isn't? I can find 60,636 followers on the RepRonPaul account. How's that make believe?
IMHO Ron Paul is a raving lunatic who is determined to shut down the entire US Government. He actually believes that the US should go back to gold backed currency and that there should be no central bank.
Ron Paul makes Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman look somewhat sane.
You mean Amanda Hugnkiss, Haywood Jablowme, Ima Spammer, and Place Holder are not real people?
How can Gingrich Twitter when he can't even come up with a new wife any more.
What is even funnier is how newt and other neocons/teabaggers all said newt was the guy who was going to beat President Obama. What a joke, all you people are! HA!HA!HA!
OBAMA/BIDEN 2012!!!
Just another ass clown in the Shriner VW racing around in the center ring. Yawn.
Speaking of delusional.
Gingrich was run out of Congress for being the poster child for Corrupt GOPer Monthly. He was caught embezzling from his own campaign to pay his mistress. Now he thinks he is presidential material?
Do any right-wingers have one single bit of humility in them? One?
What buffoons they be!
"At no time has the campaign or Gingrich Communications employed an outside group to inflate the number of followers of @newtgingrich. Any accusation of the kind is a lie, a smear and unsubstantiated."
---------------------------------------------------
Note that Hammond said that no outside group was ever used for that purpose. I guess that means it was the campaign staff members themselves that did it?
...and Boehner wept...
Fan mail for Norma Desmond.
Oh, I thought he'd already bowed out. He has zero chance of winning. So does T-Paw.
How curious....621,037 people following Palin. Any guesses as to her ratio of nutjobs to wackadoodles?
This is just like Office Space where they screwed up and got far too much money deposited in the dummy account. Someone paid a follow firm to get dummy accounts to follow Gingrich's twitter feed and overdid it by 1 million.
If Newt Gingrich walked up to me and said he was Newt Gingrich, I would think he was lying to me. He lies to the people he's married to, why would I think he'd be honest about ANYTHING?
Of course, if Newt claimed 32 trillion twits on Twitter, 20% of Americans would believe him. How do you like your neighbors now?
Fake Twitter followers? Sounds like a Palin stunt. Is she Newt's new campaign manager?
If he can get fake voters he might have a shot!