Are Gingrich's Twitter followers legit?

Former House Speaker and current GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is doing well in the Twitter primary with more than 1.3 million users, Mashable reports. The problem is, according to one of Gingrich's former staff members, many of the accounts that are following @NewtGingrich are fake.

The source, identified only as "a former staffer" by Gawker, claims Gingrich has hired "follow agencies" to create false Twitter accounts to boost perceptions of his online popularity.

"If you simply scroll through his list of followers, you'll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated," Gawker quotes the anonymous former staffer as saying. The source alleges that 80 percent of Gingrich's Twitter followers are actually phony accounts.