Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Sep 9, 2018 9 tweets 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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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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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