Meet @pzf, an account with 235K followers that is currently covering the coronavirus from around the world and breaking the news before the news, per its profile and pinned tweet. What does this entail?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Apparently, it breaks the news before the news by tweeting a mix of (usually accurate) "BREAKING NEWS" tweets with no links to sources and quote tweets hawking sales of masks, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and other things from @PzDeals. #coronagrift
The #coronavirus theme is a new twist, but @pzf has been pairing BREAKING NEWS tweets with @PzDeals sales spam since early 2016. Prior to that, @pzf's mission appears to have been to promote an associated website/wordpress blog, pzfeed(dot)com.
Is @pzf a bot? Only sometimes; it has tweeted both via organic and automated means using various apps. The TweetDeck traffic is likely a mix of scheduled and live tweets (scheduled TweetDeck tweets usually fire within the first few seconds of the minute they're scheduled for.)
We found multiple artifacts indicating bulk following lurking among @pzf's 235K followers. The circled area contains two distinct groups of batch-created accounts. One, a group of Russian-language accounts created 2012-2014, we've examined previously:
The other is a group of accounts with account names consisting of random-looking lowercase letters, zero likes, few or no tweets, all created in late April or early May 2014. 1858 of these accounts followed @pzf. Can we find more by exploring the other accounts they follow?
Answer: yes. By looking at other accounts followed by the 1858 batch-created accounts following @pzf, we found a total of 4307 accounts before hitting diminishing returns. We probably missed a few (and these accounts have other batch-created networks following them, too.)
We saw evidence beyond the bulk creation that these accounts were set up by a script; the biographies appear to be randomly assembled from a predefined pool of phrases, and randomized names wherein all consonants occur at roughly the same frequency (same for vowels.)
H/T @aaronsdevera for the lead.
