Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Mar 25, 2018 10 tweets 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Let's look at this from another angle. I've noted before that people who buy into the personas of these fake accounts tend to get attached. Is there a way to quantify and visualize these relationships? #InformationWarfare #Catfishing
Among the accounts with still-visible replies to the top 10 banned IRA accounts, there are 22156 with at least 10 replies over a span of at least 90 days. Most continued their interactions with their nonexistent "friends" right up until the trollfarm accounts were banned.
Adding some numbers to this thread based on this technique: the idea is to estimate the number of retweets the trollfarm accounts generated for the accounts they boosted based on the average number of RTs the trollfarm accounts' own tweets received.
Going by the estimates resulting from this technique, these are the twenty accounts most effectively boosted by the trollfarm accounts in NBC's dataset. Most of them are other trollfarm accounts (green).
Here are the top 20 excluding other trollfarm accounts (most are pro-Trump.)
Updating these numbers, since I finally got around to performing this test against all 2752 account names provided by Twitter to the Senate Intel committee. 2344262 replies to the banned troll accounts from 436438 users are still visible.
Earlier this evening, I noticed I have follower lists for banned Internet Research Agency accounts @TEN_GOP, @Pamela_Moore13, @tpartynes, @usa_gunslinger, @America_1st_, and @right_npr from 6/11/2017. Thankfully, no one of consequence followed these accounts. Oh wait, I lied. . .
* spelling error - @tpartynews. Because I'm pedantic like that.
* spelling error 2.0 - @rightnpr. Deal with it.
2529 accounts followed all six Internet Research Agency accounts in the previous table. 2115 are still active. Here are the external websites most frequently linked by those accounts. Seeing Unfollowspy and Crowdfire turn up prominently is interesting.

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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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