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Comment by paulmd199 | Hacker News Reader

35000 was the tip of the iceberg, it was a small sampling, not an exhaustive list. I'm only one guy with no power-toys. In all honesty, this is probably a million-account-plus botnet.

There is a possibility that this was a botnet that sells followers. I know that this one wasn't into retweeting or linking to anything, though such botnets do exist.

I wasn't able to prove that is the case with that particular network, as there were a number of "following nobody, and nobody follows" accounts. But I've found another that for sure is in the business of so doing. How does one person with only four very banal tweets get 4000 followers? It turns out that his followers are indeed bots. This network I will be collecting too. Maybe it will turn out to overlap.

@paulmd199

PS: I won't insist on the theory that it's government sponsored bot. it could well be commercial, or just run by some jerk.

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> as there were a number of "following nobody, and nobody follows" accounts

This is actually very common. Twitter recently took down a large number of bots and published a paper about their classification. One of the attributes of a Twitter bot account is it's reputation. By remaining idle, it can establish a reputation within Twitter's spam detection system, becoming more valuable when sold.

Edit: HUZZAH! After Googling like crazy, I found the paper: http://www.imchris.org/research/thomas_sec13.pdf

I fail to see the reason behind your panicked verbiage. You seem genuinely upset by this discovery, care to explain why?

Also, it'd be interesting to read some of your reasons for believing this is in any way, shape, or form a "government sponsored bot". By saying that without any reasoning, you're placing yourself squarely in the "tinfoil hat" camp.

Seriously, I'm not in the tinfoil camp. I have perhaps read a few too many Snowden documents, in detail. There are a few things I've see, concerning the use of social media. Things like "can we craft a message to go viral"

I really didn't like the message that linked Snowden to HAARP, for all kinds of reasons. It creates a false link between his documents, and the tinfoil theories surrounding HAARP, (global assassination, etc). And I have indeed seen some fake articles that tried to make precisely that claim. That kind of link would also put Snowden, and those who believe that he did the right thing, into the tinfoil-crazy camp. So it smelled bad. Maybe it's just random gibberish, like a lot of the messages. But it really smelled.

Why GCHQ vs NSA.... the most vile tricks we've learned about come from them. The Neo-COINTELPRO stuff.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

Other than that, I do have a serious aversion to spammers.

Occam's Razor

By that you mean it's obviously NSA or GCHQ.

Look, I agree that this is probably commercial spamming, not government, but let's cut out the "tinfoil hat" bullshit accusations, OK? It's ad hominem and it's often meant to suppress speculation about possible government misdeeds.

Many of those who were accused of wearing tinfoil hats because of their views on government surveillance turned out to be pretty reasonable after all, no?

By definition, "tinfoil hat" has to do with a poorly supported argument, e.g. a conspiracy theory. If anything, it's begging the question.

At any rate, no, I will not stop it. This guy is crying wolf and he needs to be called on it.

>At any rate, no, I will not stop it.

Fine, keep pulling that term out on HN and you will be seen as a provocateur, whether or not you actually are one.

Edit: And in case it's not clear, I actually do agree that the "botnet" likely has no connection to the government.

Seen by you as a provocateur, which frankly I'm alright with, Internet stranger.

>Many of those who were accused of wearing tinfoil hats because of their views on government surveillance turned out to be pretty reasonable after all, no?

No. In the security community much of this stuff was given serious thought and systems were developed to defend against these types of things (see TPMs). The only real surprise was the way it was being done to reckless abandon. There is a difference between the tinfoil hat approach of just envisioning things evil organizations/governments might do and assuming an intelligence gathering agency is gathering as much information as it can.

The more I think about it, your argument is so bad I wish I didn't even waste the time responding. You are just providing a completely unrelated example to try to give weight to baseless drivel. You could have just as easily used the same argument to support the argument that the moon-landing was faked.

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