Hey, I'm a creator of the tool written in the article.

The model looks at hundreds of features of each profile, not just a few features such as patriotic, inflammatory language, and retweets as you suggested. As a result, the model has predicted profiles with very sketchy behavior, such as accounts of normal people that were compromised and become political propaganda accounts a a few years later. We wanted to bring up these accounts and the analysis behind it so we could show the techniques behind these organizations who run these bot-like accounts. We offer our own analysis of these accounts here: https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on...