I report thousands of these every month. Yes, they appear to be spamfarm accounts. I found at least one instance where hundreds and hundreds of these random accounts were all created on several specific dates and times, had out-of-sync bios, locations, languages and pictures (someone with a Kentucky shirt, putatively named Yoshi, listing Madrid as their location, listing Turkish as their language?), and all following precisely one user: a Chennai-based “news” retweeter who appeared to have purchased thousands of followers.
A subset of these accounts were also later purchased by a self-proclaimed “record producer” and someone else who purported to be an MMA fighter.
Often, they’re created, sit there for weeks or months until someone buys them, then they tweet once, twice, maybe three times. They’re not a bot army, they seem to exist only to be purchased to pump up follower counts.
What really puzzles me is that if humans can see this pattern, why Twitter manages to let so many of them register. My theory is, Twitter has a strong interest in inflating their “active user” counts.
Yeah, I was thinking political bots, too. Considering that I received a message from Textbroker this past week asking for Washington State residents who are willing to post crafted messages to their own social media accounts, it seems like they are definitely looking at ways of gaming the system. I’m guessing that they are probably doing some experimental stuff around making some topics look like grassroots movements to see how that takes off, and that once the presidential election is in full swing, they’ll have some of these techniques down cold so that they can just automate the heck out of them.
I find this REALLY disturbing, because the potential for some really disgusting manipulation of the political process exists.
I doubt it’ll be any more effective than those “send a form email to your congressman” links that get sent around. Those things get shit-canned in even less time than they take to get transmitted. It’s like spam: sure, you see one message from “Tatiana” with a subject line of “hi,” you might click on it, but when you open the inbox and there are 30 of them all in a row, well, you don’t even have to open them to know they’re trash.
“Crafted messages” end up sounding like they were written by PR people, not normal humans, and normal humans can almost always tell.
If the intention was to get a ‘message’ out, then yes, these would probably be ineffective.
But there are many ways to change people’s perceptions/opinions about the world. The simplest, but also one of the most effective is simply to drown out messages you don’t want heard. Your company have a scandal brewing? Order a twitter botnet to drown out any hostile hashtags with positive ones. If #exxoncharityforpuppies is what shows up on the ‘trending’ panel instead of #exxonbombsnasaclimatecenter then you’ve made a difference.
There are lots of other things you can do. People develop their worldview based on their frame of reference. If every one of these bots is manned for an op by a real person, things can happen.
