Thread by @josh_emerson

There is definitely something going on.
If you look around twitter there are some very "odd" accounts.

#Macedonia #RussianMeddling #Russia #Skopje
apnews.com/b51d832612784b…

These tweets seem weird to me.
One uses a #QAnon hashtag.

Looking at those accounts you coma across these accounts:
twitter.com/makedon_on
twitter.com/SrebreniKopja
twitter.com/MAKEDONIJAeSE
twitter.com/MEbakj
twitter.com/Gogo78114891
twitter.com/vibamsorosite
twitter.com/angarija
twitter.com/PavlePetkovski
twitter.com/pipovski

all of them relatively new. with very weird friends and followers.

Mr pepe memer is probably the most interesting.
His followers include lots of pepe accounts, and lots of pro-Trump accounts.
twitter.com/pipovski

Probably the most interesting is that the Russian Embassy Macedonia follows it.

as i was scrolling past the accounts followers i noticed these accounts:

all created in 2010 with similar stats, and location set to Russia Moscow, in Cyrillic.

The previous record holders for oldest Russian botnet were these 4K bots from 2013 they looked like this:

This Russian botnet dates all the way back to 2010 and there are at least 6000 of them.

The friends and followers of those initial 9 accounts are a crazy mix of Russian accounts and bots.

you would think a twitter handle called VisitMacedonia would follow some normal accounts but you would be wrong
twitter.com/1VisitMacedoni…

I would say that twitter should red flag any account that has friended or follows one of those 9.

These old Russian bots are kinda cool, they talked to each other.

They were also sharing links to livejournal.
The original russian trolls were "ukrainian" livejournal bloggers.

google sheet with just the bots
this is one of many botnets that are in the friends and followers of those accounts.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

Took me a minute to figure it out, but this is basically the great granddad russian spam botnet.
That is also used to boost some "macedonian" accounts follower counts.
almost 10k accounts dating all the way back to 2009.
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