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News aggregation bots tend to turn up fairly regularly in our analyses. How might one study them? We'll start by testing the accounts that linked both Sputnik and RT in the last 10 days for 24/7 activity/use of automation services, resulting in 60 accounts.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This table shows some basic statistics about each of the 60 automated or partially automated accounts. The accounts have very few followers in common: of 424778 total followers, only 9993 (2.4%) follow more than one bot.
What media sources do these bots link? Although RT and Sputnik are among the prominent sites, there's actually a wide variety - Russian media is not the majority of the linked content. Let's look at the media sources from a different angle. . .
This chart shows the percentage of each bot's most recent 1000 tweets that contain links to the 30 websites most frequently linked by the entire set of 60 bots. We can use this to visually identify groups of accounts with similar lineups - i.e, 19 that look like @washpresstech.
Looking at those 19 accounts from a couple of other angles yields additional evidence that they are a single operation. The schedules are virtually identical, and all 19 post all their links via IFTTT.
