Read on Twitter
We've done a decent amount of digging into various bulk follow botnets over the last couple of years, and decided to aggregate all of our threads on the topic. Some botnets are still online, while others have been shut down by Twitter.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
First botnet: 105081 accounts, 2012-2013 creation dates, mostly English tweets. Some of them follow COVID conspiracist Senate candidate @va_shiva. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1250553993555836928
6448 accounts, Russian tweets, 2013-2014 creation dates. Some follow RT editor-in-chief @M_Simonyan. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1246873557298294784
39430 accounts, English content, 2014-2015 creation dates. Some follow former GOP candidate @LisaSongSutton. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1270868080017772549
215067 accounts, Arabic content, 2014-2015 creation dates. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1274834608241217538
295830 accounts, created between 2010 and 2012. Mostly English and Russian content. Point-of-sale account was @TwReloaded, at least at one point. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1276388018606268416
848080 accounts, created (mostly) in 2012 and 2016. Arabic profiles/tweets, @rrvvs was selling them as followers via WhatsApp at one point. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1284141301932359681
711727 accounts, English tweets, created between 2012 and 2014. @RealTonyRocha is/was the original point-of-sale account. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1287724238787547136
5295 accounts, English tweets, created in 2009. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1289702472831787008
17957 accounts created in 2020. About half used GAN profile pics. Sold on thousandfollowers(dot)com, which is currently down for maintenance. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1294824510085050374
15603 accounts created in 2014. Most tweets are Russian follower gain spam. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1295864790167048192
2319 English-language accounts created in 2011 and 2012. These were sold by @moretweeple, and it's likely there were at one point more accounts. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1304225881347497987
7461 English-language accounts created in 2020, sold on twitterfollowersbuy(dot)com. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1306384582313496578
6882 accounts created in 2018 and 2019, with tweets/retweets in a variety of languages. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1307319862537183232
4220 accounts created in 2019, with English and Arabic content. We found this one thanks to fake engagement seller @sendthetrend following us (at least until we posted this thread). https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1308770985986985991
17814 accounts with Turkish names and zero tweets, created in 2018. Some of them follow @ACTBrigitte, which is how we found this botnet. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1310685451414573056
Last botnet (for now): 95848 Japanese-language accounts, created in 2017. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1311829583969349632
Another one (we'll redo the table at the beginning of the thread eventually): 23794 accounts, mostly created 2012-2014, tweets mostly in Russian and English. https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1314690762257334272
