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Conspirador Norteño @conspirator0
, 13 tweets, 7 min read Read on Twitter
As a follow-up to this thread, we dug a bit deeper into "Tweeted Times". Here's what we found. . .
We downloaded tweets from the last 10 days containing links to tweetedtimes(dot)com, resulting in 113058 tweets from 9642 accounts. The hourly volume is very spiky; one hypothesis is that many of the accounts linking the site are bots posting tweets at the same scheduled times.
2016 of 9642 accounts (21.8%) tweet 24/7, post 90%+ of their tweets via automation services, or both. Here are the tweet schedules of 108 of them; many have bursts of tweets at a specific hour of the day, which is consistent with the hypothesis in the previous tweet.
Although only 21.8% of the accounts appear to be bots, they appear to be responsible for a far larger share of the volume.
These figures show the retweet networks for tweets linking tweetedtimes(dot)com. Unlike many of the datasets we study, there are a multitude of networks present. The themes of the tweets posted by each network vary widely, but all have a high degree of automation.
Let's take a closer look at the Tweeted Times website. This isn't the first time it's crossed the radar; see this tweet from last year when the site was hosted on an IP address in Russia.
Digging deeper into the DNS history for tweetedtimes(dot)com, it would appear that sometime between 2015 (actually 2017) and 2018 the site switched from a Russian webhost to Google Cloud (which obscures geographic origin as the site appears to be in Mountain View.)
We decided to go behind the curtain and test out Tweeted Times. Out of an abundance of caution, we enlisted @DrunkAlexJones as a guinea pig for this experiment.
Tweeted Times appears to search Twitter for tweets containing various search terms that contain links, compiles them into a "newspaper", and tweets them from the attached account. We chose "Alex Jones lunatic", "Alex Jones lawsuit", and "crazy things Alex Jones does" as searches.
The Tweeted Times setup process confirms the earlier hypothesis based on the spikes in the volume - each search phrase is assigned a time of day to tweet the resulting compilation of material.
Since we just started this project a few hours ago, @DrunkAlexJones hasn't auto-tweeted much material from Tweeted Times yet, but here are the results so far. Note that the original content creators are tagged in the tweets.
Thanks as always to @ZellaQuixote for being a stalwart teammate and for helping keep @DrunkAlexJones in line.
Update: it would appear that this thread has itself trigged the automation we set up for @DrunkAlexJones. We've seen this with bots we've found in the wild, but it's the first time it's happened with one we configured.
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