For a change of pace, here's a look at a network of meme-spamming Indonesian-language bots created at the beginning of the new year. #MondayMotivation

cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of 53 accounts, all created on either January 1st or January 3rd, 2021. None has ever liked a tweet or followed an account, and almost all of them have no followers.
These accounts tweet almost exclusively via TweetDeck, with the exception of a small number of early tweets allegedly sent via the Twitter website. They fire off tweetstorms in tandem, and their schedules are all variations on a couple of basic patterns.
This network's content is highly repetitive, and appears to be focused on Indonesian politics. (Caveat: Google translate is sometimes very wrong.) The accounts created on January 3rd mostly tweet a different repertoire of tweets than those created January 1st, with some overlap.
Here's a graphical representation of this network's repeated tweets. A line between two accounts indicates they've tweeted the exact same thing at least once; accounts that share more duplicate tweets are closer together.
Almost all of this botnet's tweets (8563 of 8592, 99.7%) contain images/memes. As with its text content, the memes are repetitive, with only 569 unique images showing up across 8563 image tweets. These six are the most common, with each having been tweeted at least 35 times.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Conspirador Norteño

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @conspirator0

7 Feb
Twitter permanently banned @gatewaypundit yesterday. With it gone, here's what the retweet network for thegatewaypundit(dot)com looks like: two main clusters (English and Japanese), and the main nodes are @mei98862477, @kirstiealley, and @CassandraRules.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Japanese-language accounts have been turning up prominently in US-centric right wing Twitter content for a while. Back in January 2020, 23.3% of tweets linking now-defunct QAnon site qmap(dot)pub were in Japanese.
Around the time of the November 2020 US election, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Rudy Giuliani all experienced a large influx of Japanese-language followers. #KrakenWorldTour2020
Read 4 tweets
6 Feb
What do these eighteen blue-check accounts have in common (other than the profile graphics)? Answer: they're all old accounts that were recently renamed and redecorated, giving the appearance that they are official Baja California Sur government accounts.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Some examples, accompanied by screenshots of each account's former appearance courtesy of Internet archive:

@Servicios122 (ID 49774815) was formerly @jess_noons
@prod121 (ID 142177657) was formerly @AmyOguntala
@secfin12 (ID 349157648) was formerly @lewaron
Here are the 18 renamed verified accounts that are currently presenting themselves as affiliated with the government of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Most appear to have originally belonged to random US residents, and it is unclear at what point they gained their blue checkmarks.
Read 7 tweets
5 Feb
Running a Yandex reverse image search on a GAN-generated face pic sometimes returns other GAN face pics, as happened here. #ThursdayShenaniGANs

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake faces.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote
The Yandex reverse image search lead us to a page featuring 4 GAN-generated face pics, supposedly specialists with a pest control company in Ulyanovsk, Russia. #ThisRoachRemovalSpecialistDoesNotExist
The pest control company in question (Marafet) has locations in a number of other cities, and many of these locations also have an alleged staff of exactly four people with GAN-generated face images.
Read 5 tweets
4 Feb
What's up with all these extremely similar-looking job listing tweets, many of which are cut off mid-word? #Spamtastic

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Answer: a botnet, consisting of 103 accounts with names indicating that they offer jobs in a certain city (i.e, @HendersonJobs1) or a certain line of work (@EngineerJobs3). They all link to the same website, e-physician(dot)info.
All of the recent "job listings" tweets from these bots link to e-physician(dot)info, which appears to be scraping real job listings from ZipRecruiter and slapping its own ads on them. Despite the website name, most of the "jobs" being offered are not in the healthcare field.
Read 4 tweets
3 Feb
Meet @Mollyycolllinss, @SteveeRogerr, @ThomassRichards, a trio of accounts created in December 2020/January 2021 with unnecessary extra letters in their names that appear to be exploiting @buzz_chronicle to harvest the content of thousands of Twitter threads.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
First, what is @buzz_chronicles? @buzz_chronicles is an account created in 2011 that saves copies of Twitter threads on an external website (buzzchronicles(dot)com). One triggers it by tagging it in a reply to the thread one wants to archive. (Similar to @threadreaderapp.)
The three new accounts we found (@Mollyycolllinss, @SteveeRogerr, and @ThomassRichards) have thus far done almost nothing but reply to threads and tag @buzz_chronicles with requests to archive said threads. 3716 of their 3752 tweets (99%) are replies of this nature.
Read 8 tweets
31 Jan
Despite the fact that musician Tommy Page passed away in 2017, his verified Twitter account (@TommyPage) is merrily tweeting away in 2021. Although one can never entirely rule out supernatural involvement, we think there's a more mundane explanation. . .

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Tommy Page's verified account (@Tommypage, permanent ID 185366038) has had its display name changed from "Tommy Page" to "xən". Most of its followers and all of its old tweets have been purged, likely by a new owner following an account takeover.
We scrolled through @TommyPage's timeline and followers/followees, and noticed a few other blue-check verified accounts that appear to have been repurposed, including water polo player Judith Forca (@JudithForca, ID 504430504) and the band Vanquish (@Vanquishgirls, ID 194666247).
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!