Thread by @z3dster

Let's have a quick talk about @twitter and bots

Here is an account with 48.3K followers and following 29.7K

Here is a look at two its most recent tweets

and a look at some of its tweets from 2015

Now why is this interesting? I used the NBC twitter archive data to find it! nbcnews.com/tech/social-me…

I went into the tweets.csv data and looked for uniquely worded tweets and searched them through twitter and around the same date twitter.com/search?f=tweet…

which yields many results:

what is happening here is all these accounts are signed up to twitter.com/tweets4pay and getting paid for views

my theory on looking at some of the bots that appear to be close in time and tweet to the Russian bots is that the IRA, Russian troll farm, actually bought..

existing bot accounts for their initial bot outing before switching to using their own and thus there are artifacts from before the purchase

@josh_emerson @bpopken @d1gi @AltCyberCommand @citizen_bot_usa @AricToler @conspirator0 @lmatsakis