ONLY 92% OF NEWT GINGRICH'S TWITTER FOLLOWERS ARE FAKE

Yesterday there were reports based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer 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! 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.

There has not been any direct evidence of Gingrich or his campaign buying followers, until PeekYou's report was released. PeekYou scoured through all 1.3 million followers on Gingrich's account and found that only 8% are real. "We just started running the 2012 candidates' numbers three weeks ago," said Josh Mackey, PeekYou's general manager of business and product development, "and when we saw [the] story, we went back to pull the Gingrich numbers. The huge majority of his followers are either completely anonymous people who have no other web presence, or they are spambots."

Mackey said PeekYou actually scrubbed each and every one of Gingrich's 1.3 million followers, using 23 criteria—including name, location, and inbound and outbound links in their feed—to determine whether they were real people. "We usually find out that real people have real web identities," he says. For the vast majority of Gingrich's followers, that wasn't true. They were either business accounts, private accounts, anonymous accounts that had only a user ID and no other discernible connection to the internet, or spambots. The average Twitter user, Mackey says, has a follower count that consists of anywhere from 35% to 60% real people. At 8%, Gingrich's is the lowest PeekYou has ever seen. "When was saw it, we actually had our quality assurance people go over the numbers for two days to doublecheck," he says.

NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATE COMMITTEE SENDS OUT FAKE TWEETS TO SMEAR DEMOCRATS

For those not on the Twitter, it's a little complicated to follow this story, but bear with me. These are the tweets from the National Senate Republican Committee account. Now in Twitter parlance, "RT" refers to "retweet" and is customarily used at the head of someone else's tweet that you wish to amplify to your followers. It does not necessarily connote approval or agreement with the original tweet, but simply a desire to share it with your followers.

Well, here's the thing with all those RTs on behalf of the Sen. John Cornyn-headed NRSC: they're all fakes. They wrote them themselves and crafted them to look like they were merely re-tweeting something written by prominent Democrats and Democratic groups. And this goes out to the more than 14,000 followers of the NRSC twitter account.

Calls to both Cornyn's office and the NRSC to defend this have as yet not been returned. Allen at ABLC imagines if this kind of behavior is considered fair play what fun could be had retweeting faked tweets from Cornyn's account.

FOURSQUARE TO ALLOW BUSINESSES TO BOOT MAYORS

Foursquare has given verified businesses the ability to oust mayors they believe to be fake and the check-ins fraudulent.  When the business gives the mayor the boot, the next in line automatically becomes mayor.

A Foursquare spokesperson stated "esterday we gave verified business owners the ability to oust a Mayor if they have reason to believe the Mayorship was not gained through legitimate check-ins. If a Mayor is flagged by a business owner, they’ll be removed from office immediately and the next user in line will take over as Mayor.

We’re still in the very early stages of experimenting with this feature and will most likely be tweaking it based on feedback from business owners."

Foursquare started the crack down on cheaters back in April when it started to take the users physical location into account. [TechCrunch]