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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
@conspirator0
Mar 1, 2018 • 11 tweets • 8 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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A Tale of an Alpaca Bot
Meet @BakedAlpacas. As the ones responsible for bringing him into being, we can say with 100% certainty that this Twitter account is a bot.
The concept of the bot is simple. He began as a parody of Baked Alaska's tweets - key words and phrases in the tweets are replaced with other words and phrases, mostly involving alpacas. Over time, tweets from additional accounts such as @AnnCoulter and @JackPosobiec were added.
Here is @BakedAlpacas' tweet schedule for the last few weeks. The point to be noted here is that although one can spot some bots by traits such as tweeting 24/7, it's trivial for the bot operator to program a different behavior.
This was a recent change - when @BakedAlpacas was first created, he was configured to tweet 24/7, with some randomization of the time between tweets.
Although there's something of an urban legend that bots can't reply to tweets, the opposite is actually true: bots easily can and absolutely do. @BakedAlpacas has at various times replied to/tagged accounts tweeting #FollowTheWhiteRabbit, #PJNET, and #TwitterLockout.
Another thing we varied over time: hashtags. Each @BakedAlpacas tweet has a random chance of having one or more hashtags added. The first incarnation used #resist and #maga, but others were added.
This chart shows the attention that @BakedAlpacas has received over time in terms of likes and RTs. Comparison with the previous chart shows that he was the most popular shortly after #FollowTheWhiteRabbit was added to his hashtag repertoire.
Who's following @BakedAlpacas? 577 accounts at the moment of this writing. Based on both the top ten hashtags as shown here and a brief visual survey, the majority are right-wing. #FollowTheWhiteRabbit isn't in there, but #QAnon is.
As a secondary project, @BakedAlpacas branched to Reddit briefly. He wasn't received as kindly there as on Twitter, with the possible exception of the @seanhannity subreddit.
Many thanks to @ZellaQuixote, in this case not only for help with the thread but help creating the subject thereof.

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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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