How does one find astroturf networks? One method is to choose a word or phrase, plot a histogram of the creation dates of accounts tweeting that word/phrase, and look for spikes. Several such spikes show up among accounts with recent tweets containing "casino".
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
If the spikes in creation dates are the result of someone creating making en masse, batches of similar-looking accounts will show up when one looks at the accounts created during the spikes. Here are some examples from the casino dataset, with possible batches highlighted in red.
The late February and early March batches from the casino dataset all use the same naming scheme, tweet using the same app ("Twitter Web App"), retweet many of the same tweets, and tweet identical tweets on multiple accounts, so these accounts are likely a single operation.
Sometimes the initial search will only uncover part of a bot/sock astroturf network. One can frequently find more accounts that are part of a network by looking at other accounts retweeting the same tweets, and exploring the followers/followees of the initial accounts.
Following this procedure with the late February/early March batch-created accounts yields 516 accounts that appear to be part of the network, all with names that appear to be randomly selected pairs of English words.
What do these accounts actually do? They retweet and reply to cryptocurrency accounts, mostly. @Roobet is the most frequent beneficiary of their astroturfing - several of its tweets have been retweeted, replied to, and liked by all 516 accounts in the network.
These accounts also follow each other profusely, in two separate groups. One cluster consists solely of accounts with late February 2021 creation dates, while the other is mostly March 2021 accounts with a few February 2021 accounts thrown in.
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