I appreciate everyone who tried to bring this thread about the @TrackerTrial account to the attention of @krystalball. Unfortunately, she and @esaagar opted to spin its suspension as a conspiracy involving Twitter's new CEO rather than reporting on facts:
Seriously, I can't get over how utterly terrible the "reporting" in that video is. There are two minutes or so of rambling about "bots" that bears no relation to anything even remotely real about bots.
This suspension in particular has highlighted that many people seem to believe *all* Twitter suspensions are unjustified. While Twitter does get things wrong, this doesn't mean all suspensions are bogus and journalists shouldn't be lazily repeating gossip without checking facts.
As far as why this particular ban might've happened:
There are multiple actual journalists reporting on this event, but for some reason everyone is sharing this tweet from an account made last month with an AI-generated face pic as its avatar.
Please be cautious about helping potentially inauthentic accounts build an audience.
Note that the tweet in question was posted via the "Twitter Web App" rather than one of the Twitter smartphone apps, meaning it was likely tweeted from a computer rather than the cell phone of someone on the scene. (TLDR, it's probably plagiarized from whoever took the video.)
Would you buy a used Twitter account for $900? At first glance, @Droopy735 (permanent ID 84861619) looks like a well-established, popular account - it's over a decade old and has over 100 thousand followers, after all. What's not to like? (As it turns out, a lot.)
Despite being created in 2009, @Droopy735 gained almost all of its 104K followers in November 2021, and none of these newly-created followers has ever liked a tweet.
The swarm of newly-created accounts that followed @Droopy735 are part of a fake follower botnet consisting of (at least) 197134 accounts, all created in November 2021. None has ever tweeted or liked a tweet, and there are definite patterns in the account names.
Ghislaine Maxwell's trial begins next week, and a Twitter account named @TrackerTrial (ID 1327007938821709826) has gone viral with a false claim that major media is not covering the case (which it of course wants everyone to follow on its Substack instead).
The claim that major media organizations are ignoring the Maxwell trial is easily refuted with a simple Google search, which reveals that AP, The New York Times, Bloomberg, NPR, Reuters, The New York Post, and CNN (among others) have all covered the trial within the last week.
Interestingly, despite having been created back in November 2020, @TrackerTrial's first tweet is from November 2021, a year later. Things are not quite as they seem, however. . .
The spammy #metaverse tweets are from a network consisting of (at least) 741 accounts with handles and display names consisting of lowercase letters and random numbers, created in batches from August to November 2021.
These accounts amplify a variety of large cryptocurrency/blockchain accounts via a combination of quote tweets, replies, and retweets. The quote tweets and replies are frequently duplicated verbatim by dozens of accounts in the network.
Follow order by creation date scatter plots can reveal interesting things about the history of popular Twitter accounts. Case in point: almost all of @maureen_bannon's first few thousand followers are accounts that primarily tweet in Chinese.
These early Chinese-language followers all followed @maureen_bannon over a relatively short span of time: specifically, the first two weeks of October 2020, roughly a month prior to the 2020 US Presidential election.
Although the Chinese-language accounts do not show obvious signs of being automated or fake, they differ from @maureen_bannon's English-language followers in one key way: they frequently link Guo Wengui/Steve Bannon propaganda sites GNews and GTV.
As it turns out, this is not @TheTexianDM's first encounter with an astroturf botnet. Here's a thread on an old botnet from which @TheTexianDM got a couple hundred retweets each on a set of #Texit tweets and about 3000 fake followers back in 2018.
This network consists of 36374 now-dormant accounts created in early 2018. Almost all of the accounts in the network either retweet or follow accounts; very few do both. All have either 0 tweets/0 likes or fewer likes than tweets.
None of the accounts in this network has been active since 2018. Back then they tweeted (allegedly) via a mix of the Twitter Web Client and Twitter for Android (iPhone is entirely absent).