Despite having tweeted #FollowMeJP daily for almost a decade (via automation tool twittbot(dot)net), none of these accounts has managed to pick up more than 100 followers. #WednesdayWisdom
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
These accounts are part of a botnet consisting of 125 Japanese-language accounts created on December 11th and 12th, 2011. Each account name consists of a lowercase English word with one or two random characters added to both the beginning and the end of the name.
These accounts behave in an extremely predictable fashion, posting exactly one tweet per day, resulting in 125 total tweets per day from the network (with rare exceptions). All tweets are sent via automation service twittbot(dot)net, and all 125 bots have default profile pics.
Who do the accounts in this botnet follow? Mostly other bots - 9 of the 13 accounts followed by at least 10 of the members of the botnet are automated Japanese-language accounts. Some of them followed the bots in the network back (and are pretty much their only followers).
The purpose of this network appears to be to tweet the #FollowMeJP hashtag, which appears in 87.8% of the botnet's tweets and is the only hashtag any of these bots use. As mentioned earlier, the prolific use of this hashtag does not appear to have gained the bots many followers.
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