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Does right-wing propaganda "news" site OANN (employer of @JackPosobiec among others) get amplified by Twitter bots? Yes indeed - 13.8% of tweets (1433/10373) linking to oann(dot)com in the last ten days were sent via automated means.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@JackPosobiec @ZellaQuixote The automated OANN tweets are the work of a relatively small number of accounts - 42 mostly/entirely automated accounts and an additional 56 that show a mix of automated and organic activity. @ConservTwitBot and @EvangTwitBot jump out as potentially related. . .
@JackPosobiec @ZellaQuixote @ConservTwitBot @EvangTwitBot Are @ConservTwitBot and @EvangTwitBot a duo or part of a larger band? We found a third via experimentation with the naming convention: @LiberalTwitBot. Per their profiles this botnet is part of someone's dissertation. All of these bots exclusively retweet (no original content.)
@JackPosobiec @ZellaQuixote @ConservTwitBot @EvangTwitBot @LiberalTwitBot All three accounts tweet every half hour at roughly the same time. We used this to round out the set by pulling a half-hours worth of all tweets containing non-image/video links and checking for accounts matching the naming convention; we found a total of seven by doing so.
@JackPosobiec @ZellaQuixote @ConservTwitBot @EvangTwitBot @LiberalTwitBot Unlike most botnets we've studied, this set includes accounts at both ends of the political spectrum, and they by and large retweet accordingly (i.e., @LiberalTwitBot mostly RTs liberal accounts, etc - @EvangTwitBot retweeting @AshaRangappa_ is a weird outlier.)
@JackPosobiec @ZellaQuixote @ConservTwitBot @EvangTwitBot @LiberalTwitBot @AshaRangappa_ Footnote: old threads discussing some of the other bots that link OANN.
