6. The Secret Society of Silhouettes

URL Shorteners are primarily used to track traffic on a particular link, but the frequency with which they are used can be an indicator of automation. 

For example, one Recently-Exposed fake account called “Angee Dixson” shared a large number of Far-Right political pos...

If accounts all post the same content at the same time, they are probably programmed to do so. They say identical series of posts which are classic signs of automation.

A Twitter Bot is simply an account run by a piece of software, analogous to an airplane being flown on autopilot.

There are clues which should be viewed as indicators of Botlike behavior at a given time, rather than a Black-Or-White definition of whether an account “is” a Bot.

Many Bots have handles which are simply Alphanumeric Scrambles. Others have typically male names but female images.

All these indicate that the account is a fake, impersonating someone. 

However, identifying the type of fake, and whether it is a Bot, will depend...

Botnets are marked by extreme diversity of language use.

Retweets posted by Erik Young, the "woman who loves Jesus" show content in Arabic, English, Spanish, and Swahili. In real life, anyone who has mastered all those languages probably has better things to do than advert...

Some Botnets appear to exist primarily for that purpose, only occasionally Venturing into politics.

When they do, their focus on advertising often betrays them. Accounts which largely show retweets like this are probably members of commercial Botnets.

A good test of an account’s veracity is therefore to reverse search its AVATAR picture. A number of accounts in the same network actually used the image, confirming that they were fakes: in the case of “Shelly Wilson”, a number of accounts in the same network actually used the im...

The account @Sunneversets100 was created on November 14, 2016. on August 28, 2017, it was 288 days old and posted 203,197 Tweets. 

This translates to an average of 705 posts per day, or almost one per minute for twelve hours at a stretch, every day for nine months.

@Dfrlab views ...

The less personal information an account gives, the more likely it is to be a Bot. 

The only unique feature is a link to a US-based political action committee:

@Blackmantrump gives no personal information at all. There is thus no indication of what person lies behind the account....

Bots boost the signal from other users by Retweeting, liking or quoting them. The most effective way to establish this pattern is to Machine-Scan a large number of posts. 

195 of @Sunneversets100’s last 200 Tweets were retweets, many of them from RT and Sputnik, while ...

Botnets can quickly be identified when they are used to amplify a single post. 

An account called @Kirstenkellog_ posted a Tweet attacking Propublica. It had only posted 12 times; 11 of them had already been deleted. 

Another account was just as idle, having posted six Tweet...