Thread by @conspirator0

Sometimes bots are drawn to the tweets one least expects, such as jokes about dancing the macarena being a potential violation of the Geneva Convention (H/T @genealogist_CA for the lead.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote

By searching the set of tweets retweeted by the original three bots (@Junais_Badat, @MuraadRizvi, @Shahida01Bano) for additional automated accounts and then repeating the process on the tweets those accounts RT'd, we were able to expand the set to 34 accounts, all made in 2015.

Although these bots were created in 2015 they were largely dormant until February 2019, when they kicked into high gear posting retweets with a variety of apps with variants on "Fan Harvest" as names. (The "erasedXXXXXXX" entries indicate apps that no longer exist.)

What accounts do these 34 bots retweet? The most frequently retweeted account is @rus4chan, a 4chan-themed account in Russian. Three other Russian-language accounts round out the top four slots; also notable are several Portuguese/Spanish accounts with "ISIS" in their names.

Footnote: @rus4chan is also automated (and created in 2015, like the other accounts documented in this thread. Doesn't use the same apps, though.)

Initially, @rus4chan doesn't appear to have been automated - most tweets prior to December 2018 were posted via the Android app or Twitter website. The operator did apparently try out a Twitter Business account from 11/2/2016 to 2/1/2017.

Almost all of @rus4chan's text tweets (much of the content is memes) are in Russian. We translated the text to English via Google translate; the content (unsurprisingly for a 4chan-themed account) is mostly random and shitposty.

What's up with @rus4chan's impressive count of 375095 followers? It's quite possibly rather inflated, as many of the followers seem dubious: 70.4% have tweeted fewer than 10 times, 79.9% have fewer than 10 followers, and 60.3% have default profile pics.