UCL Media Futures Group discovers Star Wars bots on Twitter

A team from the UCL Media Furures Group, led by Shi Zhou has discovered a Twitter botnet – which they think could comprise more than 350,000 accounts – that has tweeted thousands of random quotations from Star Wars novels. Shi Zhou and his research student Juan Echeverria Guzman accidentally stumbled upon the botnet after taking a random sample of 1 per cent of Twitter users. When plotted on a map, a strange pattern appeared. More than 3000 of them were within two oddly uniform rectangles: one roughly covering Europe and North Africa and one over North America.

The researchers used these 3000 accounts from the sample as a training set for a machine learning algorithm to identify other bots across Twitter with the same characteristics. The algorithm returned almost 357,000 positive matches.

No one knows why the botnet was set up. "One theory is bots are sold for money, they’re sold as fake followers," says Zhou. People can pay for bots to follow them to enhance their follower account and appear more popular. But if such activity ever took place with these bots, it seems to have been short-lived.

The team's discovery has been featured in New Scientist magazine and reported in a research paper.