Chris Peterson

Via TPMLiveWire/Gawker:

Yesterday, we published an item based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer’s claim that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers–a number that he’s taken to bragging about–in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! But today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich’s million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

Our source yesterday told us that about “80 percent of [Newt’s followers] are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various ‘follow agencies'” paid by his campaign.

Ok, I admit it. I’m jealous that I didn’t think of running a Twitter account creation / retweeting astroturf operation of this scale before. Astroturfing a retweet campaign yes; wholesale Twitterbot campaign, no.