We noticed a while back that @MarcoGutierrez, co-founder of Latinos for Trump and former Power10 retweet automation user, has some weird anomalies lurking among his early followers, including roughly 2000 that were created in batches and followed him en masse.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found that 2059 of @MarcoGutierrez followers appear to have been created in several batches in late 2012. The accounts all have similar numbers of tweets, likes, followers, and followees, are presently dormant, and tweeted almost exclusively via the Android app when live.
These accounts are almost all retweets; only 3625 of 602386 tweets (0.6%) are non-retweets, mostly falling into one of 3 categories:
- ALL CAPS English tweets hawking FREE TICKETS
- Russian tweets sent via "FOLLOW_ME2"
- Arabic tweets sent by accounts with not-so-Arabic names
- ALL CAPS English tweets hawking FREE TICKETS
- Russian tweets sent via "FOLLOW_ME2"
- Arabic tweets sent by accounts with not-so-Arabic names
99.4% of this bot/sock network's tweets are retweets. @syeddoha is the most frequently-retweeted account. Among of the more interesting accounts amplified were @wikileaks (in 8th place), @realDonaldTrump, and @DrJillStein.
We'll be exploring the followers and retweets of the accounts this network amplified in case it's bigger than the 2059 accounts that followed @MarcoGutierrez,
We explored the followers of the accounts most frequently retweeted or followed by the 2059 accoutns we'd found so far, and found additional anomalies. Of the aforementioned politically interesting accounts amplified by this botnet, only @DrJillStein is also followed by the bots.
We found a total of 18865 dormant accounts that we believe to be part of the network based on batch creation, use of same software (mostly Android), and retweeting the same content. Due to the degree of repetition and sheer volume, we suspect the Android tweets are automated.
Most of the content amplified by this botnet appears to be commercial, not political, btw - the previously discussed @DrJillStein, @wikileaks, and @realDonaldTrump are exceptions to the pattern.
