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Comment by skram | Hacker News Reader

That is bizarre. I've never seen that happen. Probably part of some sort of botnet as you hypothesized. The easiest thing is for you to go ahead and report the profiles as spam.

Assuming it continues, perhaps add tracking to the Twitter button in your analytics suite and see if they all come from the same user agent, location, IP, etc.

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That's probably a good idea, to just report them. The ones that have more than one tweet still seem very much like bots, but the ones that just have my tweets are just bizarre. They don't even follow people, so what's their purpose? I would have thought the purpose of bots on twitter was either to boost follower counts or retweet counts, but these seem to do neither. Unless they're just spamming people with private messages or something

>I would have thought the purpose of bots on twitter was either to boost follower counts or retweet counts

Another idea: Could be that the bots first establish a base-line as "non-spammy", i.e. legit, users by posting by themselves without sending any links directly to people. This goes on for a couple of weeks, until Twitter's automated anti-spam-process classifies them as "legit", after which the bots switch over to "spam-mode" and start spamming. Just an idea.

Yeah, it must be some kind of starting up thing, behaving normally for a few days or weeks. But even so, these are then really bad at it. ClintonGoodhue for example has one tweet, which is a link to my game, no profile picture and only follows one person. Maybe it's just someone's first attempt at creating bots :)

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