TFW you go to sleep in 2015 tweeting in Spanish and wake up in 2021 as an "Elon" account, complete with @ElonMusk's current (as of July 6, 2021) profile pic. #RepurposedAccounts#LifeComesAtYouFast
The recently awakened Elons are part of a larger network of 576 accounts created in May 2014. All accounts went dormant in late 2015, but some of them woke back up in 2021. Old tweets are almost all in Spanish, whereas new tweets are a mix of English, Indonesian, and Japanese.
The old Spanish tweets from these accounts are highly repetitive, with many tweets duplicated verbatim on dozens of accounts. Those of the accounts that are still dormant have similar names and tweet counts, and fewer than three likes (most have zero).
The accounts in this network all follow or are followed by other members of the network.
Those of the accounts that have reactivated fall into a few groups:
• 7 "Elon" accounts
• 28 Japanese loan spam accounts
• 7 Indonesian cryptocurrency accounts
• 41 other accounts
Next, we have a network of 28 Japanese-language accounts with cartoon avatars promoting an online lender. (As always, take Google's translations of the tweets with a grain of salt.)
The 28 online lending astroturf accounts send most of their tweets via TweetDeck, with occasional tweets via the Twitter Web App. With a few exceptions, they operate on extremely similar schedules.
Third, we have a group of seven Indonesian-language accounts that amplify cryptocurrency accounts via both retweets and replies. These accounts mostly tweet via Twitter for iPhone, with some Twitter Web App usage as well.
An additional 41 of the 576 accounts in the network have awakened from their multi-year slumber but do not fit into any of the above categories. Most of them tweet in Indonesian.
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We found 110 batch-created accounts (made in 2011) among @SamyDindane's early followers. To find the rest of the network, we downloaded the followers of other accounts followed by those 110 accounts and looked for additional batch-created accounts from the same time period.
The batches show up as horizontal streaks on follow order by creation date plots of the accounts they follow. This slideshow shows some examples, with the batch-created accounts highlighted in red.
OK, time to create a @DrunkAlexJones account on yet another MAGA social media site and stuff. This feature to "import copies of your Twitter" content looks interesting, will definitely test that out.
Suggested follows include NewsMax (which somehow has 905K followers on a platform that just started?) and the verification checkmark appears to be red because of course.
So far it looks like a pretty literal clone of Twitter's user interface (much more similar than Gab or Parler).
It's a Tuesday in June, and a whole ducking lot of newly-made Twitter accounts are "requesting faucet funds on the #Goerli#Ethereum test network" in a spammy repetitive fashion. #TuesdayAstroturf
These tweets are from a network of (at least) 1281 accounts created between June 22 and June 29, 2021. Each account has tweeted exactly once, and all tweets are identical other that the cryptocurrency wallet address. All tweets were (allegedly) sent via the Twitter Web App.
Each account in the network posted its one and only tweet shortly after being created, with an average of 74 seconds and median of 68 seconds between account creation and tweet time. The longest gap between creation and tweet was slightly over ten minutes.
Follow order by creation date scatter plots can be a useful diagnostic tool for finding anomalies in the followers of Twitter accounts. Here's Python source code for generating such a plot based on a follower list in CSV format.
One sign of inauthentic followers is groups of batch-created accounts that followed en masse. These groups manifest as horizontal streaks on the scatter plot, as seen here with @TWReloaded's followers. (This plot is June 2020 and @TWReloaded's fake followers are now suspended.)
(June 2020 thread on the @TWReloaded fake follower network)
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 .
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):
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 aforementioned six accounts are part of an astroturf botnet consisting of 2841 similarly-named Twitter accounts with repetitive biographies created in May 2021. These accounts (allegedly) send all of their tweets via Twitter for iPhone.
All 2841 accounts in this network use GAN-generated face pics as their profile images.
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com and similar tools to generate fake face pics.)