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7 tweets,
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Meet @WirebaughNiesha, a tweet-cloning bot automated via dlvr(dot)it.
More accurately, meet @WirebaughNiesha and its thousand or so closest friends.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
More accurately, meet @WirebaughNiesha and its thousand or so closest friends.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@WirebaughNiesha @ZellaQuixote In order to find additional bots from the same network as @WirebaughNiesha, we searched for other accounts that were tweeting some of the same tweets via dlvr(dot)it. We wound up with a total of 1132 accounts after removing a few obvious false positives.
@WirebaughNiesha @ZellaQuixote The accounts in this set were almost all created between August 2011 and February 2012. Only a few remain active at present - the vast majority went silent in early 2018.
@WirebaughNiesha @ZellaQuixote Did we mention that these accounts repeat tweets? These are the most common among the most recent 3200 tweets from each account (tweets containing images excluded.) Tweets are generally posted by a subset of accounts rather than the whole botnet.
@WirebaughNiesha @ZellaQuixote As far as we can tell, these accounts were very low volume when they were active (with the caveat that tweets may have been deleted) - each tweeted roughly every four hours. Almost all tweets were sent via dlvr(dot)it, with the exception of some early TweetDeck use.
@WirebaughNiesha @ZellaQuixote @DarrenLinvill (thread from last night on a botnet with some of the same characteristics)
