80 percent of Newt Gingrich's Twitter followers are fake

Yesterday, Newt Gingrich went on a tirade about how he should be the GOP's presidential candidate because of his prodigious Twitter following, but a former staffer has revealed that his campaign hired a firm to boost the Newt's follower count primarily by creating fake accounts.

Gingrich has about 1,325,842 followers, which is around twice as many as Sarah Palin. Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney, by way of a for instance, haven't yet broken 100,000.

This is apparently because many of Gingrich's followers are fake. Spurious. Mickey Mouse, if you will.

A former staffer elaborates:

"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... about 80 percent of those accounts [Gingrich's followers] 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..."

Randomly clicking on different followers of Gingrich's feed reveals a lack of profile pictures, personal info, tweets of their own, or really anything to suggest they aren't in fact fake profiles set up by a corporation.

Look, it's one thing to pay a company to set up a ton of fake followers for your Twitter account, but it's another to brag about why that somehow qualifies you for the presidency. Tacky, Newt. Very tacky.