The self-similar Bart Simpson accounts are part of a retweet botnet consisting of 259 accounts created in May 2022. Most of the accounts have Turkish names, and many of their profile images are duplicates.
These accounts post almost all of their tweets via a variety of custom automation apps (4643/4644 tweets, 99.9%). The accounts use a total of 10 different custom apps, with each app being used by between 12 and 41 accounts.
This botnet's content is almost all retweets of cryptocurrency/NFT content. Every account in the network has retweeted @btc_magazin at least once.
The sole reply posted by the botnet (and only tweet from the network not posted with a custom app) is to @TradeWars_10.
The accounts in the botnet all follow many large cryptocurrency accounts (mostly the same accounts they retweet). Every one of the 259 accounts in the botnet follows both @btc_magazin and @TradeWars_10.
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Here's an odd account: @Freelancers_P44, which has a couple of tweets indicating that the account operator is or was selling Twitter followers. Interestingly, almost all of @Freelancers_P44's 46,000 followers were created in the latter half of 2016.
The mass-created accounts following @Freelancers_P44 are part of a network of 116402 accounts created from May to December 2016. All of these accounts follow dozens or hundreds of accounts but have few or no followers themselves. They mostly follow large Arabic-language accounts.
It will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one that the official Twitter account of the Church of @Scientology got an infusion of fake followers early in its existence.
These fake followers are part of an astroturf network consisting of (at least) 3932 accounts created in batches in 2011 and 2012. None of the accounts has tweeted since 2015.
Who did this network follow en masse? It's kinda all over the board, although most appear to be promotional/commercial accounts, with music/TV/film being recurring themes.
Surely an account such as @Route_Crypto (ID 134233008) that confidently links a TwitterAudit follower analysis in its profile as "proof of authenticity" gained all of its 19K followers organically, right? (Spoiler: Nope, not even close.)
Many of @Route_Crypto's followers have used one or more of the Round Year Fun apps ("My Twitter Family", "My Twitter Crush", etc). These apps force their users to follow the customers of shady follower sales website realactivefollowers(dot)com, which likely include @Route_Crypto.
Here's a thread with more information on the Round Year Fun apps (including how to remove their ability to affect your Twitter account if you've used them) and the associated follower sales website, realactivefollowers(dot)com:
Here’s a look at the 25 Substack blogs most frequently shared on Twitter recently (April 26-May 5 2020). 12 of them contain an abundance of antivax content/COVID misinfo. 3 of the authors are banned from Twitter: Alex Berenson, Steve Kirsch, and Robert Malone.
In addition to tweets linking the 25 Substack blogs, we also gathered the public comments on the 25 Substack blogs within the date range studied (April 26th through May 5th, 2022). All but two of the blogs received hundreds or thousands of comments during this period.
Here's a network diagram of the comments on the 25 Substack blogs. The major antivax/COVID disinfo Substacks are densely clustered, indicating that many of the same people/accounts are commenting on them. The other popular Substacks show significantly less overlap in audience.
What's up with these three identical tweets about accelerationism and "the decline of the United States", and how did they each end up getting dozens of retweets but zero likes? #Astroturfing
The tweets in question are from a spam network consisting of 60 accounts that post repetitive tweets containing the hashtag #accelerationism in both English and Chinese. All but two of these accounts were created in 2021 or 2022, and all tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App.
We've seen a group of accounts spamming about "accelerationism" before:
This botnet consists of 52770 accounts created between March 29th and April 27th, 2022. None has ever tweeted or liked a tweet, and most have no followers of their own. Biographies are heavily repeated - the 52770 accounts have only 104 unique biographies.
This network also reuses profile images; the 52770 accounts have only 611 unique profile pics, many of them repeated across hundreds of accounts. 400 of the images are GAN-generated faces. (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com).