Thread by @conspirator0

In what is quite possibly one of the least necessary crossovers ever, here's a botnet that mostly spams propaganda about #Xinjiang but very occasionally tweets porn too .

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This botnet consists of 183 accounts created between December 2020 and March 2021, mostly in batches. Nearly all of their tweets contain random four letter codes, which we've also seen in a previous Xinjiang propaganda botnet (now suspended):

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1372007492276916224

The accounts in this botnet post almost all of their tweets via Twitter Web App, with very occasional tweets posted via Twitter for Advertisers. All of the Twitter for Advertisers tweets are Arabic-language porn tweets.

The bots in the network both post their own content and retweet/quote tweet other accounts. Their "original" content is repetitive and mostly consists of tweets with links to videos or articles about Xinjiang, many of which deny the existence of human rights violations there.

This network primarily retweets/quote tweets official Chinese government and state-linked media accounts, with Xinjiang human rights abuse denialism again being a major theme. The quote tweets generally consist of a random four letter code and nothing else.

Although many of the accounts in this botnet use pictures of scenery as their profile image, some do use photographs of people, and those photographs are (as is often the case with spammy botnets) stolen.

Nitpicky detail: you'll note that the tweet in the upper left received 95 quote tweets from the botnet but Twitter only shows 90 quote tweets. This is because some of the bots quote tweeted it twice, and Twitter appears to be only counting the first quote tweet.

(I'm not quite sure what happened with the little red ovals on this first collage, I'd intended to circle the four letter codes in the tweets but apparently something went wrong lol)

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1408185231732101121