On January 13th, 2020, shortly before midnight Pacific time, our good friend @DrunkAlexJones debuted the hashtag #FishingForRobots in order to, well, fish for robots. #ThursdayThoughts #ManyFishBite
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote We used three different tools (Hypefury, Crowdfire, and TweetDeck) to schedule @DrunkAlexJones #FishingForRobots tweetstorms at roughly midnight PST on seven recent occasions. 91 additional accounts picked up the hashtag, 76 of which are at least mostly automated.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote We designed #FishingForRobots tweets to attract bots, and evolved them several times over the course of the experiment. The first set of tweets (sent via Hypefury) contained hashtags we knew from previous experience would likely result in bots retweeting or cloning the tweets.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote We added links to MSNBC to the #FishingForRobots tweets (MSNBC is a known trigger for a taxi/realtor themed retweet botnet), and tossed in some additional hashtags that turned up repeatedly in datasets of IFTTT bots. This set of tweets was scheduled via Crowdfire.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote For the most recent iteration (via TweetDeck), we found bots that retweet tweets mentioning them and had @DrunkAlexJones tag them in #FishingForRobots tweets. The multiple forms of amplification interacted - cloned tweets got retweeted and retweets got cloned. #BotsAllTheWayDown
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote We only had @DrunkAlex tag 10 of the "tag me for a retweet bot", but there are plenty more - by exploring the networks of those 10, we found 189 bots that appear to retweet tweets tagging them (many but not all say so on their profiles.) Most are gaming/streaming-themed.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex Why does any of this matter? Well, not everyone who triggers these bots into propagating unintended content is as pure of motive as @DrunkAlexJones. Black market account sellers frequently piggyback on the "tag-me-to-RT" bots, for example (we found hundreds of recent cases.)
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex Political accounts occasionally hijack these forms of automated amplification as well. Here are some examples of US political tweets from accounts on both sides of the aisle, and the bot retweets they triggered.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex Updated #FishingForRobots retweet network. Currently, the network generated by our thread is entirely separate from the original bot-driven network, presumably we did not include bot-triggering hashtags such as #100DaysOfCode, #HillaryEmail, #HealthyRecipes, #Freebies, or #AI.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex One more #FishingForRobots update (for now.) 94 bots have now picked up the tweets, and the automated portion of the network has grown increasingly interconnected as the retweet bots and copycat bots interact. Some have also retweeted our thread describing the experiment.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex Footnote: among the automation tools used by @DrunkAlexJones to post his #FishingForRobots tweets is a new tweet scheduling service called Hypefury. Presented without further comment are the verified accounts most frequently followed by Hypefury's current customer base.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex #FishingForRobots traffic has died down as @DrunkAlexJones takes a few days sober, but a few unrelated accounts have subsequently picked up the hashtag and incorporated it into spammy tweets.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex For the last two days, @DrunkAlexJones has been #FishingForRobots using a combination of Buffer (for scheduled tweets) and IFTTT (for cloned tweets, some of which got recursive.) He triggered 840 additional #FishingForRobots tweets from 77 accounts, most of it automated traffic.
@DrunkAlexJones @ZellaQuixote @drunkalex Overall, @DrunkAlexJones has summoned 126 bots so far via #FishingForRobots tweets. He continues to attract a wide variety - these accounts have used 140 different apps (some accounts use more than one) to post their automated tweets.
In a surprising twist, one bot that neither @DrunkAlexJones nor the accounts that cloned his tweet were able to elicit a response from is the generally reliable @infinite_scream.
