Let’s look at another bought account, that of Neo_antiquarian belonging to the Rocco Castoro group repurposed to attack parents, teachers and supporters of the San Francisco recall after previously being an automated account, known as a bot.
This is the account’s first tweet.
Typical early inactivity gap.
This one shows the account was parked September 29, 2014 after working as a bot, then reactivated March 25, 2019.
And I do mean bot.
None of this activity indicates an authentic person, spending years parked, several months automated, and a heavy dose of later activity while used to abuse others. I decided to check how well this account faired on BotSentinel.
Here is the accounts most used phrases.
While clearly inauthentic, this former bot turned to a single purpose hate account avoided detection.
The account didn’t become active just for the recall. It became most active with the start of Covid.
I’m going to float another possibility by you, though I do admit there was a period of automation: the person did not use their Twitter account frequently, accidentally installed adware on their computer, and simply didn’t notice or delete their tweets when they came back.
The first tweets were composed in a web browser. Automated tweets were posted from a client named “Twitter for websites”, and the newest tweets were posted from the iPhone app.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just not saying you’re totally right, and should perhaps start imagining situations that do not fit your biases.
I’m glad we finally got here