On August 30th, an archive of communication between former US President Bill Clinton and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin was declassified by the White House. We downloaded tweets containing 'Clinton' and 'Yeltsin', resulting in 7200 tweets from 5588 accounts.
Among the themes that pop up in these tweets is the notion that former President Clinton "colluded" to help Yeltsin win, with the implication that any collusion with a foreign power on the part of Trump isn't so bad.
720 accounts have tweets containing "Clinton", "Yeltsin", and either "collusion" or "election" in the last ten days. This chart shows the news sources mostly frequently linked by these accounts. Russian state media seems popular.
Testing this set of accounts for automation (90%+ of tweets posted via automation services and/or 24 hour operation) results in 31 accounts (4.3%). This isn't a high percentage, but one of the accounts, @Global_Newscast, is worth a further look.
All of @Global_Newscast's tweets are posted via IFTTT, and all link to distressedvolatility(dot)com. This site appears to be a news aggregator that really, really wants you to help it generate ad revenue even though all it does is link other people's content.
Searching for tweets linking to distressedvolatility(dot)com in the last 10 days turns up six more bots that spam links to the site in question. One of them, @USGovReport, also RTs Trump and the official White House account.
All seven of these accounts follow 18-20 accounts, and the set of accounts followed is almost exactly the same. Checking those accounts for automation brings the total size of the botnet to 18. The majority of tweets are posted via IFTTT.
There's an evidently human-operated account in the mix too - @dvolatility. Among its specialities is encouraging people to follow its various and sundry amplifier bots via #FF tweets.
One takeaway from the above is that existing bot networks on Twitter will (often accidentally) amplify political messaging. It's unlikely that the distressedvolatility network is a Kremlin propaganda operation, but it nonetheless amplified RT's take on the Clinton/Yeltsin docs.
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