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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