The Yang Gang and its Bots
While looking for something else I fell into a nest of automated accounts pretending to be Andrew Yang supporters.
How It Started: The MAGA Bots
For the past month or so I have been building software to find, track and visualize networks of fake accounts and their activities. This is something I have wanted to work on for a long time, ever since I read an article about how bot networks were being used to cultivate leads for scammers. Social media bots are used as bait, blanketing the platforms they’re on with messages, hoping for an interaction so that they can pass you along to a scam artist.
The idea that different fake accounts are created for different purposes and coordinating their efforts together fascinated me. It scratched that anthropological itch. I wanted to know more about the economy of the fake internet.
Good software is built on an iterative cycle of experiments. In order to figure out what I should build, I needed to feed the first prototype data as soon as possible. Well…. where’s a better place to find fake accounts than the Twitter feed of the current President of the United States? A mere 100 retweets from a Donald Trump tweet uncovered four bots, each with thousands of followers that seemed sure to be bots themselves. It was terribly exciting to watch immature software draw…