Democrat Anthony Gemma added 400,000 Twitter followers in February, R.I. candidate questioned on Twitter

A primary challenger in a tight Rhode Island congressional race has nearly 1 million Twitter followers — more than Mitt Romney — but he’s not talking about how he amassed such a staggering social media fan base in a short span of time.

In February alone, Democrat Anthony Gemma, who is running even in polls against first-term Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), added 400,000 Twitter followers, according to social media monitoring sites. On Facebook, meanwhile, fans of his campaign page ballooned from 3,414 to 107,614 during the same time period.


Gemma now has more than 519,000 Facebook fans —10 times more fans than the number of votes he received in his 2010 primary loss to Cicilline. It’s a seat Patrick Kennedy held for eight terms in a heavily Democratic area, and this time Gemma has a better shot because Cicilline’s approval ratings are spectacularly low.

But the small-town plumbing executive and self-described “social media guru” declined through his campaign staff to explain how he accumulated so many social media followers so fast. “The campaign does not comment on our social media strategy,” campaign spokesman Alex Morash said in an email.

Other candidates recently have been caught up in allegations that their campaigns were buying Twitter followers, including Romney and Newt Gingrich. That’s relatively easy to do online, costs only pennies apiece and is not illegal — only in violation of Facebook and Twitter terms of service.

But an oversized social footprint that suggests mass appeal can be embarrassing for a campaign should it be revealed.

"If a candidate abuses the appropriate channels to gin up their followings, they risk hurting their reputation as a grass-roots candidate," said Amy Brown, a digital campaign strategist with Harris Media LLC who has worked with several national candidates.

Fewer than 1 percent of Gemma’s Twitter followers are based in Rhode Island, but 14 percent are in Canada, according to Michael Hussey, CEO of PeekAnalytics, one of two independent social media research firms that provided POLITICO data on Gemma. Many of his followers’ profile photos are racy and their hometowns include cities such as Istanbul and Karachi, Pakistan.

Furthermore, Gemma seems to have a surprisingly low level of engagement. On Feb. 24, the same day he picked up more than 87,000 followers, he asked his audience to retweet a photo; only six did.

“This is a Rhode Island politician,” Hussey said. “Why would a Rhode Island politician who nobody knows outside of the Providence metropolitan area have 2 percent of his followers from London or 3 percent to the state of Georgia?”

Wildfire Social Media Marketing, a firm that “scrapes” Facebook and Twitter daily to log changes in thousands of accounts, shows that the Twitter handle @ AnthonyGemma gained more than 400,000 followers in February alone — despite a modest amount of tweeting and no watershed event to precipitate it.

Gemma’s account now has about 968,000 followers, more than the presumed GOP presidential nominee Romney, who has about 825,000.

Likewise, the Facebook page for “Anthony Gemma For Congress” experienced a whopping 31-fold increase in the same span. His personal page, Anthony Gemma, did even better, skyrocketing by Feb. 29 to 169,468 fans, up 5,600 percent from the end of January.

By the time Gemma announced his candidacy in mid-April, Gemma had just over 1 million Twitter followers. His personal Facebook page had 338,000 fans and the campaign had 107,000 fans. Today those figures stand at 519,000 for his personal page and 106,000 for the campaign page.

In addition to these accounts, the breast cancer charity Gemma started in honor of his late mother presently has about 118,000 Twitter followers — or more than double the number who follow @ KomenfortheCure, the handle for the nation’s best-known breast cancer cause, Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

The Gloria Gemma Breast Cancer Resource Foundation, which tweets at @ GloriaGemma, also saw explosive growth in February, increasing its followers tenfold on Twitter and 20-fold on Facebook. On Feb. 19, according to Wildfire data, the charity picked up 25,161 Facebook fans; on Feb. 22, it acquired 58,642 new Twitter followers. In both cases, there appeared to be little or no activity on the sites and no acknowledgement of the surges.

The race between Cicilline and Gemma is seen by several observers as among the tightest in the country. University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball site listed the Gemma-Cicilline rematch as one of the 15 closest House races of 2012.

The primary is Sept. 11.

Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District is heavily Democratic; President Barack Obama won it by a 2-to-1 tally in 2008. Crystal Ball’s House editor Kyle Kondik wrote that it would be an “utter disaster” for Democrats if either Gemma or Cicilline lose in November, and R.I.-1 would then become “the most Democratic seat held by any Republican.”

Yet Cicilline had a 15 percent approval rating in a February survey, a nadir attributed to the budget disaster facing Providence, where he served two terms as mayor.

Gemma, then, is a serious contender of the dominant party who faces a badly weakened opponent. Nonetheless, his social media statistics reflect an outsized popularity, but his campaign won’t explain how the numbers were accumulated.

Wildfire spokeswoman Emily Periera offered possible explanations for Gemma’s surge, such as a major news event or an advertising campaign aimed at pumping up his Web popularity. Perhaps, she said, there was “some sort of viral promotion” in which followers had an incentive to encourage their friends to also follow.

Yet all of the Facebook and Twitter accounts tied to Gemma saw precious little activity in the period during which his numbers boomed. Also, the number of responses Gemma receives to his online remarks is very small for the size of his audience, she acknowledged.

“There’s kind of a disconnect,” Periera said. “Someone seems to be able to bring them in but then once they’re there, they don’t seem very interested.”

This is not the first time Gemma’s social media behavior drew questions. Last week, political blogger Ted Nesi of WPRI.com, the site for Rhode Island’s CBS affiliate, noted Gemma had a new Twitter handle, @Gemma4Congress, and that it had amassed 13,683 followers in nine days . A few hours after Nesi’s post, that Twitter account vanished from the Internet without explanation.

In March, Samuel G. Howard of the blog RIFuture.org questioned Gemma’s Facebook following. He wrote that several of Gemma’s fans had gibberish names, were fans of the same 16 people and listed the same movie, “Unicorn City Film,” as their favorite.

At the time, Howard produced a screenshot from Facebook that showed that the most popular locale of origin for fans of Anthony Gemma For Congress was Frankfurt, Germany. Since then, all of the fans referenced in Howard’s piece were deleted and the most popular origin for fans of the campaign page is, appropriately, Providence. Yet the most common city of origin for fans of Anthony Gemma himself on Facebook is, as of this week, Moscow.



Gemma’s online bio indicates he owns or has owned two businesses, Gem Plumbing & Heating Services Inc. and Mediapeel, a company that claims to provide media strategy advice to companies. The plumbing company also had a tremendously good February on Facebook, picking up more than 10,000 fans.

Mediapeel is not on Twitter. Its Facebook fan base, however, also surged dramatically during February.

Gemma also endured scrutiny during his 2010 run against Cicilline, when Politifact.com was asked to assess his claim that he had more LinkedIn links than President Barack Obama. The fact-checking site said it could not make a ruling because LinkedIn data was not publicly available but that Gemma’s cited source, TopLinked.Com, did put him ahead of Obama. Politifact said it was unable to locate the owners of TopLinked.com and, thus, could neither prove nor disprove Gemma’s claim.

Cicilline campaign manager Eric Hyers told POLITICO he had wondered when the media would examine Gemma’s social media data.

Gemma, for his part, seems to be trying to present an upbeat social media front. Eight hours after first being contacted by POLITICO, at 2 a.m. Tuesday, he tweeted: “Don't add up your troubles, count your blessings. RETWEET to pass it on!”

Of his roughly 968,000 followers, only 17 did. One appears to be in Rhode Island. The rest? They include followers from Kolkata, Sydney, Latvia and the provincial capital of South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 2:20 p.m. on July 26, 2012.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of Twitter followers Romney had and the number of Facebook fans Gemma had as of publication. It also misstated how many people retweeted Gemma’s tweet Tuesday. As of publication, 17 had.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Andrea Drusch @ 07/26/2012 03:55 PM CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of Twitter followers Romney had and the number of Facebook fans Gemma had as of publication. It also misstated how many people retweeted Gemma’s tweet Tuesday. As of publication, 17 had.