You might want to sit down before you read this: There’s good news today for Newt Gingrich.
The former House Speaker may be nowhere in the presidential polls, deeply in debt, and suffering snickers from observers who just watched him campaign in Hawaii but at least he’s got one thing going for him — he probably didn’t artificially pad his Twitter follower list.
You may recall the mini-scandal: a former Gingrich staffer told Gawker that Gingrich — who’s made a big deal of his more than a million Twitter followers — actually paid people to up his list, giving him a big number of followers that’s mostly trash.
It was couched as another embarrassment for the Gingrich campaign, which has been inducing cringes since the day he announced.
But on this score, it seems, the haters were wrong. Gingrich said at the time the Gawker story was wrong, and it appears his explanation that the boost in followers came from his time as a Twitter “suggested follow” was correct.
From Mashable:
Gingrich’s explanation for the mass of inactive accounts was that they followed him while he was on Twitter’s Suggested User List. The SUL was a list of more than 200 accounts users might want to follow; Twitter promoted it in 2009 and 2010. There were 10 politicians on the list, including Al Gore, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jordan’s Queen Rania and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.If Gingrich was correct, all of the politicians on the SUL would have roughly the same composition of followers. So we asked Topsy, a social media search company, to conduct an exhaustive, weeks-long analysis of the followers of every politician on the SUL.
The result: No matter which way you slice it, nearly all political accounts on the SUL have the same levels of inactivity among their followers as Gingrich.
Read the rest here.
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Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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