It's a great day to explore bots that attempt to game retweet-to-win contests! (and possibly ensnare them into retweeting portions of this thread. . .) #SundayShenanigans #SundaySpam
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We began by downloading 24 hours' worth of retweets containing the word "win". Although most of the traffic is organic, there does appear to be quite the variety of automation apps in play.
We then downloaded recent tweets from each account that used an automation app to retweet a tweet containing "win", and kept accounts matching these criteria:
• at least 50% of tweets are automated
• at least 90% of automated retweets contain "win", "giveaway", or "contest"
• at least 50% of tweets are automated
• at least 90% of automated retweets contain "win", "giveaway", or "contest"
This left us with 105 bots that appear to be dedicated to retweeting retweet-to-win contest tweets. Some are more prolific than others; the accounts with enough traffic to calculate a meaningful average range from 3 to 719 retweets per day.
We found two botnets among the contest retweet bots. We already posted about the first (20 accounts tweeting via MyGoodBot.) The second consists of three accounts with similar app names and schedules: @matthewrw1978, @missfreyasmith, and @mrrickmatthews.
Retweet network for the 105 contest retweet bots. Many of them (including both botnets) disproportionately retweet contest/giveaway tweets from two accounts: @OriginalFunko and @Ropelet. Overall, they've amplified at least 68080 accounts.
Finally, we attempted to determine what words (other than "win") were likely to be triggers for the retweet bots. We considered any non-trivial word that appeared in at least 1/3 of the automated retweets of multiple bots to be a potential trigger.
We then had @DrunkAlexJones post a set of nine bait tweets containing the likely trigger terms (as well as a few hashtags and mentions intended to trigger unrelated bots) and watched for two hours.
The results: @DrunkAlexJones was retweeted by 42 automated accounts over the duration of the experiment, including 11 retweet-to-win contest bots, several of which retweeted more than one of the tweets. In the unlikely event he wins anything, we'll keep you posted.
