Meet @SRRRJ, @Srm1n, @DemiLovatoTH, @banci__, and @gdibarry, a quintet of automated accounts that tweet CNN articles accompanied by partial headlines and tag @null (a suspended account) in each tweet.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
These five accounts presently send all of their tweets via automation service twittbot(dot)net. There are two distinct schedule patterns, so it's possible this is two separate botnets, but since the accounts are otherwise similar we analyzed them as a single network.
What does this botnet tweet? It's quite single-minded: all recent tweets (the last ~3200 from each account) contain links to CNN, accompanied by the beginning of the title of whatever article/video is being linked.
These accounts are repetitive, which isn't surprising as all their tweets are portions of the same CNN headlines. All tweets begin with @null, which may be a coding error rather than an intentional tag - in many programming languages, null is the value of an unassigned variable.
An interesting consequence of starting each tweet with "@null": this botnet's tweets are categorized as replies by Twitter, causing their recent content not to appear in their timelines unless one clicks "Tweets and Replies". This may or may not be intentional.
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