These accounts sure are taking the “Don’t try to be original” aspect of this quote to heart. . . #SpammySunday
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote The repeated “Don’t try to be original. . .” tweets were posted via The Social Jukebox, and the accounts posting them share other tweets posted via the same app. By searching for the shared tweets, we found 238 accounts tweeting cloned content via The Social Jukebox.
@ZellaQuixote What does the repeated content consist of? By and large, inspirational quotes ending with the name of the person being quoted and the text #quote. At first glance, this seems like a single botnet. Is it?
@ZellaQuixote Things become less clear when we look at the individual accounts; they weren’t created in batches and the distribution of creation dates looks pretty organic. They also show some variance in schedule and degree of human activity (although most are 90% automated or more.)
@ZellaQuixote To investigate further, @DrunkAlexJones bravely volunteered to give the Social Jukebox app a whirl. Like pretty much every Twitter automation tool ever, it requests more permissions than it really needs (DM and reporting access, for example), as well as an email address.
@ZellaQuixote @DrunkAlexJones Once @DrunkAlexJones signed up for The Social Jukebox, things became clearer. The app allows you to set up one or more “jukeboxes” of tweets to be randomly tweeted from your account; jukeboxes of quotes are among the suggestions for new users, resulting in the network we found.
@ZellaQuixote @DrunkAlexJones The Social Jukebox also allows you to create your own custom jukeboxes, which @DrunkAlexJones eagerly did based on some of his more insightful tweets. He added two of the built-in quote jukeboxes and added the hashtag #TheresAWarOnForYourOhNeverMind to all the tweets.
@ZellaQuixote @DrunkAlexJones Here’s the result of The Social Jukebox running on @DrunkAlexJones’ account for a little over an hour with the settings shown in the previous tweet. Hopefully he has the good sense to slow down a bit eventually.
@ZellaQuixote @DrunkAlexJones We’ve seen The Social Jukebox before, btw - given what we’ve learned after using it, the account described in this earlier thread (@TomthunkitsMind) probably didn’t use the preconfigured jukeboxes and instead supplied one or more tweet sets of its own.
