Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jun 13, 2018 10 tweets 9 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Everything is Bottier in Texas
We've looked into social media activity related to secession movements before, primarily #Calexit (btw, #CalexitIsStillAKremlinConJob). Let's divert our attention to the Lone Star state and check out automated Twitter traffic around #Texit for a change of pace.
Repeated tweets are one distinct sign of automation, and a Twitter search for #Texit doesn't disappoint. Refining the search to "Good morning GregAbbott_TX. We're ready for a vote on #Texit." reveals a pair of accounts (@JohnDuBose6 and @RCC_JDGIV) that tweet this text every day.
Here are the tweet schedules for @JohnDuBose6 and @RCC_JDGIV. @JohnDuBose6 tweets nothing other than the #Texit tweet at the same time every day, while @RCC_JDGIV occasionally throws other tweets into the mix. Both accounts use IFTTT to post their tweets.
Let's widen the net and see if we can find more bots tweeting about #Texit. One way to do this is to search for various phrases used in #Texit tweets as well as #Texit tweets with links to services such as IFTTT, and then check the accounts for signs of automation
Testing the results for accounts that tweet 24/7, post 90% or more of their tweets via an automation service, or both yields 216 probable bots with #Texit tweets. There are probably more; the set of searches used was not comprehensive and the search results only go back 10 days.
Thanks to @ZellaQuixote for research/targeting assistance with this thread.
Performing a similar set of searches for #Calexit and testing for accounts that tweet round-the-clock and/or post 90+% of their tweets using automation services yields 532 automated accounts. Is there overlap between this set and the #Texit bots?
The answer is yes. There are 63 accounts in both the #Texit and #Calexit bot sets. (Probably more - again, these searches are unlikely to find every automated account that used the terms in question.)
How much volume do these bots produce? Based on the recent tweets from each account:

#Texit bots: 63305 tweets per day
#Calexit bots: 123399 tweets per day
Overall: 180045 tweets per day (number is lower than the sum because some accounts are in both sets)

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More from @conspirator0

Oct 9, 2018
Honey Pot Bots
Meet @ShawneeDeaver. This account's first tweet - and only non-reply tweet - is 2scEY0T, an apparently random 7-character alphanumeric code. The rest of the tweets are replies sent within hours of its creation; the collage is representative. (Thanks @OlgaNYC1211 for the lead).
We decided to look for more accounts like it. We started by harvesting the recent replies to the accounts that @ShawneeDeaver replied to, and filtering the results to accounts with a 7-character code as their first tweet and all subsequent tweets being quickly-launched replies.
Read 9 tweets
Oct 8, 2018
Let's take an updated look at the traffic related to Russia Insider, a Russian news site featuring sections such as "Western Collapse", "The Jewish Question", "Free Assange", "Russiahoax", and "EU Conservative Uprising".
(previous Russia Insider thread in which failed Congressional Candidate Paul Nehlen featured prominently)
We downloaded the last ten days worth of tweets linking to russia-insider(dot)com, resulting in 5357 tweets from 2779 accounts.
Read 13 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
While looking for streams of the Kavanaugh confirmation cloture vote yesterday, we stumbled on @Seekandfind, an account that linked Russia Today's stream. Spoiler alert - this account is (at least presently) a bot with signs of some human interjections.
This account is extremely high-volume (900+ tweets per day at present) and uses a massive cornucopia of different automation tools to tweet (mostly Microsoft PowerApps, Buffer, Integromat, IFTTT, and Zapier).
What does @Seekandfind tweet about? 37.1% of tweets contain one or more of the keywords shown in this chart - the Trump, Hillary Clinton, MSM/fake news, and deep state categories being the most prominent.
Read 10 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
On October 2nd, the news came out that envelopes containing suspected ricin had been mailed to the Pentagon and the White House. We downloaded tweets containing the word "ricin" a few hours after the news broke, resulting in 45007 tweets from 29308 accounts.
Here's the retweet network for "ricin" on 2018-10-02. It consists almost entirely of right wing accounts, most of which are speculating that the ricin mailing was left-wing terrorism.
We tested a sample of 10000 of the accounts with ricin tweets for automation (based on either 24/7 activity or 90%+ of tweets being posted via automation services/custom apps). 817 (8.2%) were flagged as bots. Let's look at a few of them.
Read 12 tweets
Oct 4, 2018
Yesterday (2018-10-02), four members of the white supremacist group known as the "Rise Above Movement" were arrested by the feds for their part in the violence at the #UniteTheRight rally in Charlottesville in August 2018. Let's take a look at related Twitter traffic.
(previous thread on the Twitter activity surrounding the #UniteTheRight hashtag leading up to and during the rally last year.)
We downloaded tweets containing "Charlottesville" and "arrests", resulting in 15082 tweets from 12331 accounts beginning with the first report of the arrests (from @HenryGraff).
Read 13 tweets
Sep 30, 2018
How does one go about detecting Twitter bots (automated accounts)? Let's take a look at three different tests for detecting signs of automation, and try them on three different sample sets of accounts.
The first two tests may be familiar from previous threads:

1. 24/7 tweet activity - this could point to multiple human operators, but is usually the result of automation/tweet scheduling.
2. Use of automation services such as IFTTT or custom apps built with the Twitter API.
The tweet schedule plots shown in the previous tweet can be used to visually perform both these tests. You can generate them yourself for accounts of interest here: makeadverbsgreatagain.org/allegedly
Read 9 tweets

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