The jig is up to Twitter bots. You are guilty of your passion for Star Wars. A massive legion of 350,000 accounts was exposed by a pair of researchers.
A student researcher by the name of Juan Echeverria Guzman and Shi Zhou, the man's supervisor and senior lecturer at University College London discovered the bots which possibly spread spam or suspicious links. The bots might also be used to fire trending topics and influence data regarding user opinions.
Guzman says that the accounts which were seemingly made in a short window of time act in an exact pattern while it quotes Star Wars novels. Most of the tweets also seemed to have broken words or have an incomplete sentence. One sample tweet with a quote coming from Star Wars: Choices of One, says, "Luke's answer was to put on an extra burst of speed. There were only ten meters #separating them now. If he could cover."
The tweets are also complete with random hashtags. All of the tweets are also tagged as coming from Windows Phone, making it seem that an API is responsible instead of the Twitter site. You would think that bots can only be noted by standard egg icon, but apparently, real profile pictures are being used to go undetected.
According to the pair, they will be sharing a paper covering the details in the future. The researchers will not yet be sharing the acquired data with Twitter yet as the pair are waiting for their current research to be approved in a scientific journal.
Interested people might be happy to know that the Star Wars botnet dataset, however, will be available for study. Apparently, the data is tens of times bigger than any public collection on Twitter bots. A website and a Twitter account (@thatisabot) are up and running to report these bots.
