Thread by @conspirator0

Sometimes one gets followed by accounts that aren't quite as they first seem. Take @Chanel_Co_, created in 2009 with 53.1K tweets and a two year gap in activity prior to May 25th, 2019. Should we follow back?

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Although @Chanel_Co_'s recent activity is pretty light, things were much different in 2016/2017. This account has several bursts of intense, very rigorously scheduled, and evenly paced activity, suggesting automation despite the use of the Twitter website to post the tweets.

Among @Chanel_Co_'s spammy old tweets, we found three distinct types of content:

- inspirational quotes
- links to clickbait news articles
- tweets consisting entirely of random punctuation marks and (dead) Google Plus links

The quotes don't appear to be original; we searched Twitter for all 894 of @Chanel_Co_'s old tweets without links, and at least 768 (85.9%) are borrowed from elsewhere. What about the weird punctuation mark tweets?

The burst of tweets assembled from random punctuation began in early June 2017. Initially, every single one was identical other than the Google Plus link, but this behavior evolved within a couple days to per-tweet randomization.

What earthly purpose do the random punctuation tweets serve? One possibility: if @Chanel_Co_ is part of a botnet, this makes finding other accounts in the network difficult, as Twitter has no means of searching tweets for punctuation.

We can, however, search for tweets linking to a given website, and searching for tweets linking to Google Plus in the same timespan that @Chanel_Co_ was tweeting the weird punctuation tweets indeed reveals other accounts doing the same thing.

Using this method, we found a total of 84 accounts belonging to the network (including @Chanel_Co_.) All of them have both the random punctuation tweets and the much-copied inspirational quotes.

As tends to happen with bots, at least some of the accounts (possibly all) use stolen profile pics. (We're taking it for granted that Alyssa Milano and Anne Hathaway haven't embarked on a new career as botnet operators, which seems a safe assumption.)

Coming back full circle, who have these bots followed lately? The first to cross our radar (@Chanel_Co_) is on a #resistance following binge, but looking at accounts recently followed across the whole set, this botnet targets both sides of the political spectrum in equal measure.