Thread by @conspirator0

We took a look at the other followers of some of the Arabic accounts followed by the now-suspended fake Sidney Powell account @SidneyPowell_, and found a portion of a bulk follow botnet following @aL7ijaaz. #TuesdayThoughts

cc: @ZellaQuixote

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1335253117668126720

To find the rest of the network (or at least most of it), we recursively explored the followers of large accounts followed by the bots we'd already found. Many of the accounts the botnet follows appear to have almost no real followers whatsoever.

We found a total of 522180 accounts that we believe are part of this fake engagement network. All were created in batches between July 2013 and March 2014, frequently exceeding thousands of accounts per day. They have repetitive naming schemes, and none has ever liked a tweet.

These accounts are now dormant, but when active they supposedly tweeted via Twitter Web Client (prior to October 2013) and Twitter for Android. The vast majority of their tweet content is in Arabic.

The accounts in this botnet post both original tweets and retweets, with the majority of the content being highly repetitive original tweets. The most frequently repeated tweets (assuming Google Translate got things roughly right) are about gaining large numbers of followers.

The accounts most frequently retweeted by this botnet and the accounts it follows are mostly Arabic-language accounts, albeit different sets of accounts. As mentioned earlier, many of the accounts it follows appear to have gained most or all of their followers from this botnet.