Beginning at 10:40 AM CST on December 4th, a bevy of identical tweets (examples shown here) began appearing on Twitter. Let's suss out what's going on.
@ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote
At the time of our analysis, 94 accounts had posted copies of the tweet in question. None show obvious signs of automation, but there are unusually high percentages of accounts with default profile pics, few tweets, and/or few followers.
Here's the very first tweet, from @Woody2652. There aren't any obvious signs in the Twitter data as to why there are a bunch of identical tweets. Are they bots that weren't detected by our statistical tests, or is something else going on?
Checking platforms other than Twitter provides the answer: probably not bots. This operation was via a Facebook post with a "click to tweet link", by an account that shares the name "Woody" with the account that posted the first tweet.
H/T @EaterofSoles for the lead.
