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Ask HN: Why are Twitter bots tweeting my stuff?

7 points by einaregilsson ↗ HN
I have a few online games, that have Tweet buttons on them. Lately I've been noticing tweets from these buttons from Twitter profiles that seem to be bots. They have no profile picture, typically no followers, and only 1-10 tweets. The tweets they have seem pretty random as well. Some examples:

https://twitter.com/hamim1922

https://twitter.com/Grsdixiewp

https://twitter.com/elbunny205

https://twitter.com/ClintonGoodhue

Some of those have only one tweet, which is the one from my buttons.

What is happening here? Do Twitter bots just search the net for Tweet buttons and tweet the message from them, to make themselves look more real?

I just think this can make me look bad, particularly fake profiles with a single tweet from my page, it looks very much like I'm building up a twitter botnet to promote my stuff, which I'm absolutely not doing.

Can I stop this somehow? Generate the tweet button dynamically or something?

4 comments

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skram
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.

einaregilsson
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
a_bonobo
>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.

einaregilsson
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 :)