Sometimes interesting things lurk amongst an account's first followers, and so it is with @MondoDeJoey, AKA former Power10 user @JoeyNoCollusion. His ninth follower is former #QAnon Congressional candidate @DeAnna4Congress, and the prior eight are dormant bots.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The tweets from the eight dormant bots following @MondoDeJoey appear to be news headlines presented without the actual articles, and these eight accounts are far from the only ones in the botnet.
By exploring the followers of accounts followed by the initial eight bots, we found 295830 accounts that we believe to be part of the network. Several accounts were followed by massive swathes of it, particularly @TwReloaded which has almost no followers outside of this botnet.
Almost none of these 295830 accounts have tweeted since 2015, but when active they hypothetically tweeted via various versions of the Twitter website. They were created in batches from 2010 to 2012, and most have account names that don't match their display names.
These bots repeat tweets across accounts, with many tweets appearing verbatim on hundreds or thousands of accounts. Most of these tweets look like titles/headlines separated from the content with which they were originally associated.
Finally, who do these bots follow? Mostly promotional accounts, with an apparent emphasis on online marketing. Most are English-language accounts, although Russian, Greek, and Japanese turn up as well.
H/T @JoeyNoCollusion, er, @MondoDeJoey for the lead.
One more thing. We assembled a dataset earlier this year of all Twitter accounts created prior to May 2012, and can confirm that @MondoDeJoey (ID 429414242) was previously a proud mother of four named "Mark Maldonado" who tweeted about Insane Clown Posse.
Also, that Insane Clown Posse tweet that @MondoDeJoey (ID 429414242, formerly @sotoprincx) deleted? In a fascinating coincidence, it's one of the repeated tweets used by the botnet described in this thread.
Looks like @MondoDeJoey found this thread and isn't a fan. Sad!
On a hunch, we checked on the accounts in this dormant botnet to see if any had reanimated in the ~2 days since we originally pulled the data, and indeed 38 accounts posted their first tweets in years, changed their names, or both.
Although the majority of the reanimated accounts as of yet don't appear to be tweeting the same content, eight of them did retweet @wabitoken (a digital currency account) since waking up.
We would not be remotely surprised if additional accounts in this botnet reactivate, whether under the control of the original operators or of new parties to whom they have been sold/transferred. We'll keep an eye on it.
