Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has 1.3 million Twitter followers, making him the 280th most-followed person on Twitter, according to Twitter Counter. But there's just one problem. Most of them aren't even real.

Gawker claims 92 percent of Gingrich's followers are fake. Social media search company PeekYou analyzed Gingrich's list of followers to find that he actually has about 106,055 legitimate followers. But what about the other 1.1 million or so followers?

Gawker said it was told by a source that a vast majority of "[Gingrich's followers] are inactive or dummy accounts created by various 'follow agencies'" paid by his campaign. By contrast, Sarah Palin has less than half the number of followers (600,000) that Gingrich does, which makes Gingrich's count seem oddly high.

"We just started running the 2012 candidates' [Twitter] numbers three weeks ago," Josh Mackey, PeekYou's general manager of business and product development told Gawker. After PeekYou noticed Gawker's original post calling Gingrich out, Mackey says they "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."

In fact, PeekYou did an in-depth analysis of Gingrich's followers using 23 guidelines including name, location, and ingoing and outgoing links to their profile in order to determine whether they were actual people.

"We usually find out that real people have real Web identities," Mackey continued. "For the vast majority of Gingrich's followers, that wasn't true."

The average Twitter user is followed by somewhere between 35 and 60 percent real people. Only eight percent of Gingrich's list are actual humans, which is the lowest rate PeekYou has ever discovered.

"When we saw it, we actually had our quality assurance people go over the numbers for two days to double check," Mackey said.

Meanwhile, Gingrich's camp has vehemently denied the claims, ABC News reports.

"We've never utilized firms, agencies, or outside organizations to inflate Newt's Twitter followers," Gingrich's press secretary, R.C. Hammond said.

PeekYou's 2012 GOP candidate shows that other candidates are employing fake followers, but at a much lower rate. Mitt Romney has 26 percent real followers, Michelle Bachmann has 28 percent and Tim Pawlenty has 32 percent.