Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Data Scientist/Musician/Participant in the General Confusion @trutherbotprop Resist autocracy and research/counter disinformation. I serve the realm.

Aug 8, 2021, 9 tweets

The repetitive biographies that frequently mention beavers may be silly, but the fact that you can pay to have thousands of these accounts retweet, reply to, or follow you is even sillier. #SundaySpam #BeaverAstroturf

cc: @ZellaQuixote

These accounts are part of an astroturf network consisting of (at least) 11599 accounts created (mostly) in 2021. Each account has a two word biography composed of a capitalized adjective followed by a lowercase noun, drawn from a pool of 36 adjectives and 36 nouns.

The accounts in this network follow a variety of accounts, with cryptocurrency as a recurring theme. The account followed by the largest swath of the network is @PRm4u_official, the "official" account of prm4u(dot)com, a website selling SMM ("social media management") services.

prm4u(dot)com (the site promoted by @PRm4u_official) sells Twitter retweets, replies, likes and followers, and offers parallel services for several other social media platforms. Interestingly, you can choose the device type for several of the services (iOS retweets, for example).

The prm4u(dot)com site was registered quite recently - July 18, 2021. As always, we recommend taking precautions when checking out shady websites (we visited this one through Tor), and buying social media followers and engagement from mysterious third parties is generally unwise.

Here's a slideshow of follow order by creation date plots for the 25 accounts most frequently followed by the network, with the followers from the network highlighted in red. (Some of the plots have anomalies indicating the potential presence of other bulk follow networks).

(more on follow order by creation date plots, including python source code)

The majority of this network's content was posted in 2021, mostly via the Twitter Web App but with some tweets from smartphone apps as well. (Unsurprising, given that customers can select the device type for the retweets etc that they buy.) Most of the content is retweets.

Who/what does this network amplify? Lots of variety; cryptocurrency is a recurring theme, with @justinsuntron as the most frequently amplified account. This network has also retweeted hashtag-laden tweets from a few tiny accounts (examples: @Richard28680795 and @JosephG84349587).

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