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There’s an army lurking in the underbelly of Twitter.
Legions of fake Twitter accounts, called bots, roam the virtual social media landscape, often wreaking havoc wherever they go. You’ve probably encountered these accounts, those so-called eggheads, in Twitter’s untamed wilderness. They seem drawn to political conversations, but are often used to artificially inflate the number of followers a profile has, send spam and manipulate online sentiment. Herded by shadowy “botmasters,” these accounts can be financially lucrative, especially after they’ve been around for a few years.
Two researchers from University College London claim to have discovered an army of 350,000 such bots hiding in plain sight, distinguished by their affinity for tweeting quotes from Star Wars novels. And, like Aragorn bursting into the throne room at Helm’s Deep to deliver the news of an encroaching orc army, they have come to warn us.
Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou discovered the botnet while conducting research on automated accounts. Drawing from a random sample of one percent of Twitter users, and filtering for just English-speaking accounts, they noticed something odd in the distribution of geo-tagged tweets. While most of the tweets came from urban areas in North America and Europe — as expected — a puzzling number seemed to come from uninhabited areas such as the middle of the ocean or the desert. Diving deeper, they found that almost all of these unexpected tweets quoted Star Wars novels, and were active for a very short period in June and July of 2013. They also had very few friends and followers and were all listed as coming from a Windows phone.
www.discovermagazine.com
Legions of fake Twitter accounts, called bots, roam the virtual social media landscape, often wreaking havoc wherever they go. You’ve probably encountered these accounts, those so-called eggheads, in Twitter’s untamed wilderness. They seem drawn to political conversations, but are often used to artificially inflate the number of followers a profile has, send spam and manipulate online sentiment. Herded by shadowy “botmasters,” these accounts can be financially lucrative, especially after they’ve been around for a few years.
Two researchers from University College London claim to have discovered an army of 350,000 such bots hiding in plain sight, distinguished by their affinity for tweeting quotes from Star Wars novels. And, like Aragorn bursting into the throne room at Helm’s Deep to deliver the news of an encroaching orc army, they have come to warn us.
Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou discovered the botnet while conducting research on automated accounts. Drawing from a random sample of one percent of Twitter users, and filtering for just English-speaking accounts, they noticed something odd in the distribution of geo-tagged tweets. While most of the tweets came from urban areas in North America and Europe — as expected — a puzzling number seemed to come from uninhabited areas such as the middle of the ocean or the desert. Diving deeper, they found that almost all of these unexpected tweets quoted Star Wars novels, and were active for a very short period in June and July of 2013. They also had very few friends and followers and were all listed as coming from a Windows phone.
Researchers Uncover Twitter Bot Army That's 350,000 Strong
Researchers Uncover Twitter Bot Army That's 350,000 Strong
www.discovermagazine.com
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