Meet @bmjisoo, a self-described Events & Program Manager, Adventurous Foodie, Global Trotter, and National Park Explorer. Based on its flurry of recent pro-Trump and anti-Biden retweets, it would at first glance appear to be a #MAGA account.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The full story is a bit more complicated. @bmjisoo began its Twitter life as a Korean-language account back in 2014, took a five-year hiatus, and then woke back up in 2020, first retweeting a bunch of Indonesian follower farming spam before assuming its current #MAGA persona.
The account presently known as @bmjisoo also changed names at least once: when it was tweeting in Korean back in 2014, it was named @blbml08t6e. (Its permanent ID is 2287181347, just in case it swaps names again.)
Although @bmjisoo is currently presenting itself as male, it had a different biography in August 2020 where it apparently claimed to be female. Despite its current pro-Trump persona, it somehow got listed on a #VeteransForBidenHarris2020 follow list in September 2020.
Adding to the intrigue, @bmjisoo's first couple hundred followers are almost all Korean accounts created on January 11th or January 12th 2020 with extremely similar random-looking names that have never liked a tweet.
These batch-created followers of @bmjisoo are part of an old bulk follow botnet. To find the rest of the network, we explored the other followers of the accounts followed by the bots that followed @bmjisoo.
We found 463 accounts that we believe to be part of this bulk follow botnet, all created on January 11th or 12th, 2014. All these accounts are presently dormant, and tweeted exclusively via "Twitter Web Client" back when they were active.
The bots in this network repeat tweets across accounts, although no tweet is shared by more than four accounts. Translations are provided with the caveat that machine translation should always be taken with a grain of salt.
Interestingly, one of the repeated tweets was also tweeted by @bmjisoo, which was created during the same timeframe as the bots in the network. Additionally, its original name (@blbml08t6e) matches the botnet's naming scheme, indicating it may once have been part of the botnet.
Update: @bmjisoo found this thread, but can't seem to decide what to think of it.
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