Most Twitter users are familiar with followers who have strange names and avatars. Everyone knows to some extent that they are likely automated fake accounts, known as bots.
Real Twitter users often dismiss these bots when they decide to clean up their accounts a bit. But a British researcher believes there are far more bots out there than we think and that we occasionally see on our accounts.
The bots are with you
Juan Echeverria, a computer scientist at UCL, has published a paper about a network of 350,000 Twitter bots that he calls the Star Wars botnet. He believes they can send spam, manipulate public opinion, and infect the Twitter API stream. The bots are created and centrally controlled by a botmaster. His research began by sifting through a sample of 1% of Twitter users to better understand how people use the medium. But along the way, the research uncovered many connected accounts, meaning that one person or group is running the botnet. These accounts don’t behave like most bots out there.
Echeverria and his collaborators found that the Star Wars Bots:
- They send excerpts from at least 11 Star Wars novels,
- Each tweet contains only one offer, often with incomplete sentences or broken words at the beginning or end
- The bots never retweet.
- Each bot has created <= 11 tweets during its lifetime.
- Each bot has <= 10 followers and <= 31 friends.
- The bots choose as the source of their tweets only «Twitter for Windows Phone».
Echeverria and fellow researchers have started a website and Twitter account called “That is a bot!”, where real users can report bots they have seen and help raise awareness.
May The Force Be With You.
