Thread by @conspirator0

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.