A Flood of Russian Twitter bots with English names

Virginia Murr June 20, 2019

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Knowing that Russia is still actively attacking us via cyber-war: I have to wonder how Twitter’s fancy algorithms haven’t removed these Russian Twitter bots that have English names, an embarrassingly obvious pattern, all following the same account?

The Pattern

Names vs profiles

2. How many words can you make out of the phrase “Russian bot”?

Basically, that’s how these bots are formatted.

They took some pictures, first names, & last names, and randomized them. Scrolling the account reveals the redundancies.

Redundant pics

2a. Redundant First Names

2b. Redundant Last Names

3. These are old accounts with either zero or very few tweets, following, and followers.

In other words, the accounts may be old, but the bot is NEW.

We know that Russia interfered with 2016 elections, in part, with fake social media accounts. We also know that foreign interference is ongoing.

A quick translation from Russian to English and—in a matter of minutes—these Russian Twitter bots are ready to be weaponized.

Twitter was informed of these accounts in October 2018. They still haven’t gotten rid of them.

With self-regulation comes immense responsibility—and, in this case, national security. Social media platforms have proven time and again that Congress will have to act in order to defend our electorate from voter manipulation and disinformation on those platforms.

See our follow-up article that takes a look at the bot network hosting these accounts: The Russian-English Twitter Bot Network.

For information on how to spot a bot, see our Bot Tutorial.

Written by Virginia Murr