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Sometimes one doesn't have to look very far to find a suspicious Twitter account, because the suspicious account in question (specifically, @lilmurrayne) conveniently joins the ranks of one's own followers.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote Based on its most recent followers, many of which have a blue wave emoji or #resist or the like in their profiles, one might think that @lilmurrayne is a liberal Twitter account. If we scroll back 1380 followers, however, the accounts are suddenly all in Japanese.
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote The situation gets even more complicated the further back we go. @lilmurrayne's first few hundred followers are Arabic-language accounts, followed by several thousand in English, then alternating English and Arabic sets, then Japanese, then most recently #BlueWave accounts.
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote As a control group of sorts, here are the same plots for our own followers. The infusions of followers in other languages are absent, and the plots look fairly uniform throughout. (@ZellaQuixote's looks slightly different from 8-10K due to use of follow lists.)
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote Speaking of follow lists, it seems likely that this is how @lilmurrayne is picking up resistance followers. Of the 1380 accounts to follow it since it flipped from a Japanese to English/#BlueWave audience, at least 781 (56%) are on or have replied to one or more of these lists.
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote Along with the change in mission came a change in name, from @MurrayDucky to @lilmurrayne. We uncovered the change by searching old datasets for the account's permanent ID number (3380404804). Interestingly, we found it among the mutual followers of Brexit troll @DavidJoBrexit.
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote @DavidJoBrexit One more interesting tidbit: @lilmurrayne has deleted the majority of its tweets. This could've been done in tandem with the name change, but we believe other factors may be in play as well.
@lilmurrayne @ZellaQuixote @DavidJoBrexit One of @lilmurrayne's few live tweets is a quote tweet of @HornyFacts, an account popular with tweetdeckers. Some of @lilmurrayne's missing tweets may be deleted retweets resulting from tweetdecking or lobbing (the practice of trading temporary retweets.)
