When it comes to trying to take an advantage over their rivals, politicians will often use all kinds of dirt to try and get the upper hand. Newt Gingrich might have supplied some golden ammunition for his competitors in the battle to become the Republican presidential nominee. It has been claimed that his campaign has paid several agencies to create fake Twitter accounts and follow him to boost his follower numbers.

A former campaign staffer claims that Gingrich has hired several agencies that exist only to help people increase their follower numbers. The ex-staffer is quoted as saying that around 80 percent of the accounts that follow Gingrich are dummy or inactive accounts set up by these “follow agencies” and another 10 percent are accounts that belong to real people but are part of a network of people who follow each others’ accounts and pay for the privilege. If this is true, that means just 10 percent of Gingrich’s 1.3 million followers are those who are legitimately interested in his tweets. Ouch.

Taking a quick look at Gingrich’s followers shows many accounts with no bio, a default profile image and very few tweets being posted — all of which indicate that these could be dummy accounts. As Gawker points out, Gingrich is one of the people featured on Twitter’s recommended list of users to follow, but that does not really explain why he has more than double the number of followers that Sarah Palin (who also features on Twitter’s list) does when she is arguably a far more high-profile Republican politician. Palin has 619,992 followers at the time of this writing.

Gingrich announced his candidacy for the presidential nomination on Twitter (with a link to a YouTube video) and he seemed to have a reasonably good knowledge of how to harness social media for his campaign. However, it seems that damage control is now the aim of the game as his rivals will undoubtedly try to use this against him.