Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

Jan. 24, 2017

Massive collections of fake accounts are lying dormant on Twitter, suggests research.

The largest network ties together more than 350,000 accounts and further work suggests others may be even bigger.

UK researchers accidentally uncovered the lurking networks while probing Twitter to see how people use it.

Some of the accounts have been used to fake follower numbers, send spam and boost interest in trending topics.

On Twitter, bots are accounts that are run remotely by someone who automates the messages they send and activities they carry out. Some people pay to get bots to follow their account or to dilute chatter about controversial subjects.

"It is difficult to assess exactly how many Twitter users are bots," said graduate student Juan Echeverria, a computer scientist at UCL, who uncovered the massive networks.

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The researchers are now asking the public via a website and a Twitter account to report bots they spot to help get a better idea of how prevalent they are. Many bots are obvious because they have been created recently, have few followers, have strange user names and little content in the messages.

The network of 350,000 bots stood out because all the accounts in it shared several subtle characteristics that revealed they were linked. These included:

tweets coming from places where nobody lives
messages being posted only from Windows phones
almost exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels

It was "amazing and surprising" to discover the massive networks, said Dr Shi Zhou, a senior lecturer from UCL who oversaw Mr Echeverria's research.

"Considering all the efforts already there in detecting bots, it is amazing that we can still find so many bots, much more than previous research," Dr Zhou told the BBC.

Twitter deserved praise for its work on finding and eliminating bots, he added, but it was clear that skilled hackers had found ways to avoid official scrutiny and keep the bots ticking over.

The pair's most recent work had uncovered a bigger network of bots that seemed to include more than 500,000 accounts.


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It was hard to know who was behind the collections of fake accounts, said Dr Zhou, although there was evidence that a small percentage of the accounts had been sold or rented as they were now following Twitter users outside the main bot network.

"What is really surprising is our questioning on the whole effort of bot detection in the past years," said Dr Zhou. "Suddenly we feel vulnerable and don't know much: how many more are there? What do they want to do?"

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