At the end of July, Congressional Candidate Anthony Gemma was accused of “buying” friends on Facebook and Twitter but how many of those friends were real?

A website designed by the social media management company StatusPeople and recently reviewed by the Business Insider reveals that Anthony Gemma’s twitter following is 79% fake. What is a fake friend?  A fake friend is an account that is not linked to a person but is instead an autobot that exists to send out spam.

The site does note that when dealing with individuals with unusually high followings of over 10,000 people or more it may not be 100% accurate  “If you're very 'popular,' the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base,” states the website.

Gemma, who describes himself as a social media guru on twitter, currently has 939,677 followers and is following 177,429 accounts. His opponent in the Democratic primary, Congressman David Cicilline has 3,496 followers, 2% of which StatusPeople.com deem fake.  On the other side of the aisle, Statuspeople.com reveals that 4% of Republican candidate Brendan Doherty’s 11,565 followers are fake.

Just for good measure, the interactive team at WPRO ran the WPRO_Newsroom account and the WPRO account, revealing that 4% of the newsroom followers are fake and 6% of the 630 WPRO followers are fake.

Why does it matter if people have fake friends? StatusPeople.com explains it like this, “People buy followers in a vain attempt to build legitimacy. They are essentially trying to game the system and it's important for you to be able to spot them, and steer clear of them. Ultimately, if you're willing to lie about how many friends you have, you are not a very trustworthy individual.”

Recently the Huffington Post ran President Obama’s twitter account revealing that 41% percent of his followers are spam and they checked on Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 855,287 followers, (less than Anthony Gemma), revealing that only 15% of his followers were fakers.  Both national candidates had less “fake friends” than Gemma.

Calls to the Gemma campaign were not returned.