What is at the heart of Twitter's infested Bot account network?

On TwitterBotThere is Twitter bot account which pretended to be a human being automatically murmur tweet by tweet. It is not operated by human beings, but graphs that visualize the connection of Twitter bot accounts that the contents of the tweets are just copies of retweets and other people's tweets are released.

This is what a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like ← Terence Eden's Blog
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/03/this-is-what-a-graph-of-8000-fake-twitter-accounts-looks-like/

Terrence Eden who is a senior product manager at British mobile phone company 'O 2' said he was in trouble because multiple Tweets saying "Terence is becoming a trend in London" from a strange Twitter account .


These Twitter accounts were twitter bot accounts that randomly tweeted the same content as other people's tweets and pretended to be an account used by humans. Looking at the account name of Twitter, it is only accounts of a stringed character string such as "@ ekip_uhokoqeq" and "@ utadaqusoxeh", and it can not be thought that it is used for a sound purpose.


Also, in the case of the account below, the name is "Susan Phillipsa", but the picture used for the icon can not be seen as "Susan" regardless of how it is, Terrence.


When you open the profile of a Twitter bot account, you can see that you are illegally using other people's photos and information. For accounts with the following images, it is assumed that the tweet contents are tweeted by randomly extracting from other Twitter users.


Also, if you look at the Twitter account that these accounts are following, it seems that the suspicion that the account you are following is also Twitter bot account was rich.


Therefore, in order to visualize the connection between Twitter bot accounts,scriptCreating a graph with full use of it. The following graph visualizes the connection (mutual follow) between Twitter accounts with account name of the dramatic character string, "It should not have an ordinary Twitter account in this," said Terrence. The character string on the graph is a Twitter bot account, "Twitter BOT Account A" which is following "@ ekip _ uhokoqeq" and "Twitter BOT Account B" which follow each other with "Twitter BOT Account A" , And so on, from "@ ekip_uhokoqeq" to the three accounts ahead are summarized.


In addition, the graph below summarizes the Twitter bot accounts that follow up with "@ekip_uhokoqeq" in graphs up to the fourth Twitter bot account. The total number of Twitter accounts belonging to the Twitter bot account network beginning with "@ekip_uhokoqeq" is over 8000, and you can see how many Twitter bot accounts exist.


This is Python'sGraph-toolIt becomes like this when visualized with.


Furthermore, if you put together a Twitter bot account up to five ahead, it is like this. There are eight networks roughly divided.


The network with the Twitter bot account is a closed network, and in the center of the network there is an account that is used by humans, not a bot. Although it is unclear why these people are using multiple bots to show a large number of followers, Terrence says that accounts at the center of the Twitter Bot account network have a number of followers There seems to be more than 650,000.

Please note that the meta data on Twitter bot accounts investigated by Terrencefrom here(ZIP file)It is possible to download.