We started looking at some of the various botnets that follow @realDonaldTrump. First up: a group of Korean-language accounts with identical biographies that appear to be advertising adult services.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found 679 accounts with the biography "오빠야놀자 " and a link to the Twitter account @opaya24 on their profiles, 514 (75.7%) of which have default profile pics. All presently tweet the same content (videos advertising the website oppa24(dot)com) via the Twitter website.
Many of these accounts have been around for years and have scattered older tweets, but unlike the recent content they were sent via variety of apps and the content seems fairly random. It's possible the accounts were hacked or purchased, but hard to prove one way o another.
The accounts in this network don't repeat tweets verbatim, but their (recent) tweets are nonetheless repetitive, with the same phrases appearing over and over in varying orders. Translations as always should be taken with a hefty grain of salt.
In addition to the 679 bots/socks in this network, there are 2 accounts that appear to be central nodes. The first, @opaya24, is linked from the profiles of the bots and its profile in turn contains a link to the website the network promotes (oppa24(dot)com), which the bots lack.
The second central node, @todayopa, seems to serve as a media repository for the bot accounts; most of their video content is shares of its videos. This has the effect that some of its video tweets have thousands of views and no other interactions (0 retweets/0 likes.)
Finally, who do these bots follow? Of the 20 accounts followed by the largest number of accounts in the network, 17 tweet in Korean and 3 in English, with @realDonaldTrump in the top spot.
