Bots have been a major nuisance for Twitter in the recent past and have played a major role in a number of significant global events. The pretenders are not only used to spread fake news on the platform, but were also used to sway the last US Presidential elections. While it isn’t difficult for an informed user to spot a Twitter bot, it has been quite a challenge for the company to get rid of bot accounts for good, so that even new users remain safe.
All the accounts that Patel discovered had similar phrases in their profile descriptions and contained shortened links to adult dating websites. While the landing pages were different for various regions, in Finland, the links redirected to a website called “Dirty Tinder”.
To discover more such accounts, Patel wrote a script which looked for similar traits in accounts that were being followed by the Bot accounts. Upon running the script for several days, Patel discovered over 22,000 accounts that exhibited similar traits. However, upon further investigation, he realised that the accounts had nothing in common. They were created on different dates and they tweeted/liked different thing at different times.
