How much of the #followback activity on Twitter is driven by bots? As it turns out, quite a lot: 62.9% of tweets sent in the last week containing #followback, #follow4follow, #followforfollow, or #f4f were tweeted via automation tools.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found 1551 mostly or fully automated accounts using #followback, #follow4follow, #followforfollow, or #f4f. Twittbot(dot)net is the most popular automation tool, and the majority of the accounts tweet in English or Japanese.
These 1551 accounts do not appear to be a single operation, but we can find multiple smaller networks based on the tweets repeated across accounts. Each cluster is a potential botnet (some of the loosely-connected ones are false positives.) We took a closer look at four of them.
First up, we have 44 accounts whose names are all variations on "world_talk_app". These all tweet via twittbot(dot)net, and their profiles promote a "Calls and Chats App" in multiple languages that has been "coming soon" since 2016.
This botnet is incredibly repetitive - nearly all tweets consist of the same eight hashtags (including #follow4follow) accompanied by photos. @world_talk_app4 changes things up a bit by also including hashtag spam tweets without photos in both Japanese and English.
Next, we have 49 accounts automated via something called "SocialRabbit Plugin". These accounts do two things:
• tweet photos with repeated captions such as "Like and share if you think it's fantastic!"
• link a website accompanied by hashtags and a photo of a supposed product
• tweet photos with repeated captions such as "Like and share if you think it's fantastic!"
• link a website accompanied by hashtags and a photo of a supposed product
What is SocialRabbit? We wanted to have @DrunkAlexJones test it, but weren't exactly excited about downloading and installing unknown software from a site hosted in Belize. Curiously, many of the sites promoted by the botnet are hosted on the same Belize ISP (examples shown.)
Not all of the #followback botnets push associated products or services; some solely tweet content intended to gather more followers. Here's an example of a 14-account English follower growth botnet, automated via twittbot(dot)net. (There are many like it.)
Same deal, except this time partially in Japanese. (We found a few additional Favo_tsumu_XX accounts that haven't yet tweeted, but didn't include them in this analysis.)
