Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #pjnet
Most recents (6)
Trail from the #PJNET Christian technologist to an erotic app. (thread)
Mark Prasek’s PJNET drove the CruzCrew hashtag. Prasek calls himself a Christian Technologist.
washingtonexaminer.com/11-billion-twi…
washingtonexaminer.com/11-billion-twi…
Mark Prasek, PJNET, By His Grace Ministries, used the address 3139 Mulberry Park Blvd, Tallahassee, FL: corporationwiki.com/Florida/Tallah…
Meet @Sir_Max, a proudly automated member of the Oathkeepers with 610K tweets and 7824 followers at the time of this writing. Max's interests include @wikileaks, duplicated tweets, and more duplicated tweets.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We analyzed @Sir_Max's tweets from January 1st, 2016 through the present day. Almost all tweets are automated via either IFTTT or Wordpress. It demonstrates some slightly more elaborate crossposting and tweet cloning behaviors than many of the bots we've seen. . .
Twitter released several additional datasets this morning of accounts that were suspended on suspicion of being state-backed disinformation operations. Let's take a look at the additional 418 Russia-aligned accounts first.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
There are 927536 total tweets in this dataset, with some activity as far back as 2010 but the majority of the tweets happening between early 2015 and November 6th, 2018 (US midterm election).
What did these accounts tweet about? The "Trump", "Islam", and "Hillary Clinton" categories are the most prevalent. The #QAnon category has far more activity than in the previously-released IRA dataset (22179 tweets vs 2721).
Today we'll take a look at accounts that are by and large automated, but likely have a more hands-on human operator than a pure "bot". We have two examples; one on the right, one on the left. Coin flip says look at the right-wing one first.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
First up: @gerfingerpoken. This account is presently tweeting round-the-clock using "SweeterTweet", an automation service that will allow one to "schedule a massive 500 repeating tweets for any day or time" and features a cartoon strawberry (with chocolate) on their website.
Use of SweeterTweet is only the latest incarnation of @gerfingerpoken's automation. Back in 2017, they used a combination of #PJNET and something called smqueue. Despite @gerfingerpoken's protestations, Twitter was correct to flag the account as automated.
Interesting suggestion. Let's take a look.
We downloaded tweets going back to July 2015 containing the hashtag #IStandWithIsrael. There are several spikes, including two in mid-2016. Let's focus on those.
Restricting the time range to tweets between 5/1 and 9/1/2016 leaves 25404 unique tweets (73373 including retweets) from 989 accounts. Of the 20 that received the largest number of RTs, 14 have #PJNET in their profiles.
A Tale of an Alpaca Bot
Meet @BakedAlpacas. As the ones responsible for bringing him into being, we can say with 100% certainty that this Twitter account is a bot.
The concept of the bot is simple. He began as a parody of Baked Alaska's tweets - key words and phrases in the tweets are replaced with other words and phrases, mostly involving alpacas. Over time, tweets from additional accounts such as @AnnCoulter and @JackPosobiec were added.
