If you woke up this morning wondering if someone had made a cryptocurrency astroturf botnet that falls in love all over again every time it sees Sean Hannity, you're in luck.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of 266 accounts created on December 7th and December 8th 2020. All the accounts in this network have (allegedly) sent all of their tweets via the Twitter Web App.
What do the bots in this network do? They primarily amplify cryptocurrency giveaway/promotion tweets via retweets by retweeting, replying to, and quote-tweeting them. They primarily amplify a group of twelve accounts (although one, @Latestairdrop3, is suspended).
The accounts in this botnet activate for periods of few hours at a time and all fire off the same type of tweet when active, beginning with original tweets on Dec 7/8 2020, followed by retweets on Dec 10, followed by a week or so of quote tweets, followed by replies, and so on.
Unlike the majority of the botnet's content, the original tweets it generated when it first came online aren't cryptocurrency astroturf - they're images of scenery with (often grammatically incorrect) text captions. Both images and captions are repeated.
The replies and the majority of the quote tweets (and all of the retweets) are repetitive interactions with cryptocurrency tweets. A few of the quote tweets are quote tweets of popular accounts with the same (non-cryptocurrency-related) text as the early image tweets.
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