Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #FridayAstroturf
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This network of spammy Twitter accounts wants to ensure there's fair competition in the metaverse (or something). #FridayAstroturf
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 36 accounts created over a span of 10 minutes on February 10th, 2023. All 36 tweet via a mix of automation service IFTTT and allegedly human-operated Twitter clients such as the Twitter Web App and Twitter for Android.
The "original" content tweeted by these accounts is mostly tweets containing links to articles on a wide variety of cryptocurrency news sites with varying degrees of reputability. The text of these tweets generally consists of the article title and the author's Twitter handle.
How did these six seemingly unrelated tweets end up with thousands of likes but few or no retweets? Are the likes coming from a large astroturf botnet created over the last month? (Spoiler: yup.) #FridayAstroturf
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of (at least) 13870 accounts with lowercase display names created between July 29th and August 26th, 2021. None has tweeted as of yet, but all follow dozens or hundreds of accounts and most have liked dozens or hundreds of tweets.
The bots in this network do two things: like tweets and follow accounts. The account whose tweets they've liked most frequently is @JuanOrlandoH, the President of Honduras. Many (not all) of the other accounts that received lots of likes from the botnet are cryptocurrency-themed.
Peru's next president will be chosen in a runoff election on June 6th, and a network of recently-created accounts (many with stolen profile pics) is expressing its astroturfed preference for Keiko Fujimori over Pedro Castillo via TweetDeck. #FridayAstroturf
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 114 Spanish-language accounts created in batches between March 26th and April 30th, 2021. Thus far, these accounts have posted almost all of their content via TweetDeck (6989 of 7101 tweets, 98.4%).
These accounts tweet about the upcoming election, a mix of tweets promoting right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori and tweets attacking left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo. They retweet each other's political content frequently, along with occasional retweets of large accounts.
