Oddball Republican Newt Gingrich has been exposed for gaming Twitter's follower count. But is he just our 'inner dweeb'?
Newt Gingrich has always been odd. Even if you share his politics – slashing aid to needy children, telling the world that the seated American president is a threat comparable to the Nazis, and the general belief that "from 1965 to 1994 … America went off on the wrong track" (presumably the "wrong track" that led us to feminism, Stonewall and the civil rights movement) – there's something weird about the man. He speaks openly about humans colonising other planets. He writes goofy historical fiction. He's spent way too much time writing Amazon.com reviews of spy novels. Joan Didion described him, in her graceful way, as having a "scent of failure". Another way of putting it is that Newt Gingrich is a gigantic dweeb.
And now, of course, he's involved in the dweebiest of all scandals: lying about how popular he is on Twitter. Discussing his troubled presidential campaign, Gingrich scoffed at Michele Bachmann's measly follower count of 59,000 (now 67,606): "I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined," he claimed.
A quick look at his Twitter profile shows that his follower count stands at over 1.3m. But what Gingrich wasn't expecting was that people would take more than a quick look. Gawker received a tip from a former staffer, saying that Gingrich had paid firms to create fake Twitter followers; search company PeekYou analysed his follower list, and found that 92% of them were dummy accounts. Adding insult to injury, PeekYou added that Gingrich's percentage of real followers was "the lowest we had ever seen".
Gingrich's campaign has denied the allegation, of course. But the whole scandal is just so sad and weird – so distinctively Gingrich – that the denial rings hollow. In fact, Gingrich ought to be proud, for once: he's masterminded a bold new form of fraud. So new that we don't actually have a name for it. "Astrotweeting," my editor suggested; I'm a fan of "imaginary friending".
Social media are a proven way to enhance the market value of a person, an organisation or a campaign. And so, everyone is jumping on board – even people who aren't quite sure how to use it yet. Even after endless social media hype, passionate amateurs still tend to have a more intuitive, nuanced grasp of what they call "brand building" than the best PR teams; politicians' use of Twitter is normally clumsy, at best. But Newt, the dork who wrote 156 Amazon reviews, figured out early that follower count mattered. And he apparently figured out a way to game the system. It might be the one point in his career where his personal oddity paid off.
The ruse looks transparent now, but how long did it go on before anyone thought to ask who those 1.3m Twitter followers were? Most people just saw a big number and took it at face value. The only people who could expose the lie were other people who spent their days over-engaging with the internet. We're entering a bold new world: a world in which, in order to stay correctly informed, we'll all have to be bigger dweebs than Newt Gingrich. God help us all.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/04/newt-gingrich-twitter
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