Every day's a great day for hashtag hijacking pornbots! We found 140 tweeting this particular tweet; can we find more by searching for duplicates of their other tweets? #WednesdayWisdom
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Answer: yes indeed. By searching for duplicates of the tweets tweeted by our original set, we were able to find a total of 2293 pornbots that appear to be part of the network. All were created March 10th or later and tweet 24/7 exclusively via "Twitter Web Client".
This botnet has rapidly kicked into high gear, exceeding 100 tweets per hour in its initial barrage on March 10th, and peaking at nearly 500 tweets per hour earlier today.
What do these pornbots actually tweet? Each tweet is composed of one of a set of repeated phrases, two or more hashtags, and a photo (pinned tweets link a porn site.) Most hashtags used are cities, but other things are peppered in here and there (#coronavirus, #qanon, etc.)
H/T @Cantide1 for the lead.
