Thread by @conspirator0

What's up with all these similarly-named automation apps being used to retweet Japanese #cryptocurrency account @hikari1985? #TuesdayThoughts

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We found a total of 170 accounts using custom apps with names of the form ABC-123-XYZ to retweet various Japanese tweets. Many of these accounts also use either twittbot(dot) or various custom apps to post occasional original tweets.

Almost all of the tweets posted by this network (192925 of 193602 tweets, 99.7%) are sent via automated means, and the accounts are active 24/7. 86.2% of the content is retweets (sent via the ABC-123-XYZ apps), and the remainder is original tweets (all other apps).

Here are the 40 accounts this botnet most frequently retweets, as well as the 10 tweets retweeted by the largest number of bots in the network. The content seems to be all over the place, with the caveat that we're reading it via Google Translate because we don't speak Japanese.

The original tweets posted by this botnet are repetitive, and based on Google Translate (which sometimes gets things quite wrong), a lot of it appears to be follower farming spam.