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7 tweets,
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When you're a squad of newly-minted bots with randomized 15-character names, sometimes you can't help being late to the party. In this case, the party is the #TwitterBlackout, which was over by the time all but one of these 27 accounts retweeted the hashtag.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Looking more closely at the accounts reveals other similarities. Other than @LnbHkEYM4KoGEul (the only one to boost a #TwitterBlackout tweet before rather than after the event) all are recent creations with Arabic display names, and they all RT'd the same #TwitterBlackout tweet.
The 26 accounts (we omitted @LnbHkEYM4KoGEul as a potential false positive) do not appear to be focused on #TwitterBlackout; in their short lives they've retweeted 47 distinct tweets from 30 accounts. Can we expand the set by looking at what other accounts retweeted these tweets?
Survey says yes. By checking the retweeters of the tweets retweeted by the initial set of bots and repeating the process on tweets retweeted by those accounts (and so on,) we found 3921 accounts that match the pattern (and there may be more.)
Who does this network retweet? In some ways, it's all over the map: the top three accounts are a fashion blogger, Honda of Qatar, and a CNBC contributor. The next three are a bit more interesting-a group of partly automated accounts that promote Mexican politician Jaime Bonilla.
(previous thread on a group of accounts with a similar naming scheme)
(previous thread on a few bots that amplified/hijacked the #TwitterBlackout hashtag)
