While digging into Max Nordau I stumbled upon an interesting name-related inactive “test” account, @Amcgimpsey14 with an overly large botnet following. While this isn’t too likely to be the same Andrew McGimpsey as the guy operating Max Nordau, it seemed strange when a grouping of non-profile pic accounts all scrolled up together like this.
Most of the other accounts amcgimpsy followed were cryptocurrency pushers and Major League Baseball. My theory for his following these particular accounts was the hope of taping into the automated following the tester network had been building. As that didn’t work, the account was long abandoned with no indication other than the name of who it might have belonged to.
I started peering at this above cluster of bots that each followed 0-1 accounts while having between 20-50K followers each. All the follower accounts I checked had themselves a small number of following/follows that too appeared to be long ago abandoned, parked online. Some of the accounts with profile pictures were empty accounts, while others had a small handful of tweets appearing to possibly be authentic. Those that didn’t have profiles were very similar in following/follow sizes.
Of the main “tester” network accounts this one shown below has 0 likes and 1 tweet that garnered an automated 179 likes and one very angry Michael Jackson fan response given the insensitivity of the MJ tweet.
Nearly all the accounts following Tester3 that I looked at were tiny, mostly empty and having varied creation dates. Here are three of those accounts without a profile picture. Note the similarities.
Zero followers. That meant these accounts were tasked specifically to follow. There were no tweets or likes on any of the ten accounts similar to these I checked. That indicates the network at this stage was designed only to inflate purchasers account following, not spam. Given the similar follow totals, I would assume each account was scripted to follow X accounts daily for Y days. This would likely build up some accounts to the 20-50K followers which then could be sold despite being both empty and having no active follows.
While there are many of these botnets on Twitter, this one appears to be dormant. If Twitter really did intend to clean up its platform, it would start off-lining dormant accounts and networks like these, that simply sit, waiting to be sold or scripted. That second part poses a risk.
If whomever created the codes for these decided after more than a decade to revive them, how dangerous could an automated network of 40K targeting an election or recruiting for an insurrection be?
For that we turn to Rocco, who himself over a two-day period in May grew his “following” by 1K without explanation yet still finds himself unable despite the boost to stimulate impressions that would get his account noticed by anyone except his mom.
