Why do so many Journey fans have a goal of exactly 18K followers, and why are all of their biographies identical? #DontStopAstroturfin
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The weirdly identical Journey fan accounts are part of a network consisting of (at least) 28750 accounts created in Aug/Sept 2021. All have similar-looking random names, no tweets, few or no followers, follow similar numbers of accounts, and have liked similar numbers of tweets.
No account in this network has a unique biography. The 28750 accounts use a total of 1054 distinct biographies (including an empty biography), each of which appears on at least 11 accounts.
The accounts in this network do two things: like and follow. The tweets liked by the network are mostly from cryptocurrency accounts, although a couple political accounts appear: @JuanOrlandoH (President of Honduras) and @AfD_Muenster (affiliated with German far-right party AfD).
The set of accounts followed by the botnet is a bit more varied, although cryptocurrency is once again a major theme. Various athletes, musicians, a bank, and other business accounts turn up as well.
Here are follow order by creation date scatter plots for the accounts most frequently followed by the astroturf network. The followers from the network appears as horizontal streaks (highlighted in red for clarity).
This network has some similarities to another recently-created astroturf network (including the artificial inflation of the like count on @JuanOrlandoH tweets) and may or may not be related.
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