Twitter contains an impressive quantity of Japanese bots. We pulled a million Japanese tweets sent via the twittbot(dot)net app, which it turns out is only six hours' worth of traffic.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
251843 accounts sent automated Japanese tweets over the six hour span in question. These accounts are disproportionately recent creations (possibly due to bot operators replacing banned accounts) and several spikes indicating potential batch creation are present.
It's easy to pick out individual botnets based on things like repeated content, batch creation, and patterns in naming scheme. Here, for example, is a network of 108 accounts that appear to be tweeting the same content.
Not only do these 108 accounts tweet the same material, they all do it on the same schedule. Due to the sheer quantity of accounts, we're not going to describe every single botnet, but can we get a general idea of how many there are?
To find out, we filtered the data to tweets of non-trivial length (at least 30 characters) that had been tweeted verbatim by at least two of the accounts. This left us with a total of 15170 accounts that are likely botnet members rather than solo projects.
Duplicate tweet network for recent tweets from the 15170 bots in question. Each cluster (there are ~130, depending on how one counts the loosely-connected ones) is likely a separate botnet. They range in size from pairs of accounts to networks of hundreds.
Related - (mostly) French-language botnet that has ~300 of these Japanese bots as followers.
