I Pretended to Be An Alt-Right Twitter Bot

And now I need a lie-down

Around about a month ago, I decided I wanted to do some research into the followers of a well-known Russian bot alt-right account.

However, when I tried to follow the account to see the follower list, I realised it was protected, meaning I’d need the account owner’s approval to become a follower.

Now, my Twitter account is, shall we say, a hotbed of liberal snowflake commentary, and so somewhat unsurprisingly, my follow request was denied by this bastion account of alt-right propagandising.

Rather than leave it at that, like I imagine most normal people would, I decided to go undercover.

I created a new Twitter account, with the sole purpose of becoming an approved follower of this alt-right heavyweight.

This is the story of how I became an alt-right Twitter bot, what I did to convince the alt-right community I was one of them (or at least someone’s bot sympathetic to their cause) and the lessons I’ve learnt.

Day One:

As I say, all I wanted to do was get access to a known bot’s follower list (from now on, this bot will be referred to as RBARA — Russian Bot Alt-Right Account)

But the problem was, to get through the strict vetting process this account seemed to have set up for its followers (I’m thinking to prevent liberal journalists from easily accessing it?), I needed to become a convincing member of the alt-right.

At first, I thought I could just set up an account, with a name like “I Heart Trump Maga”, and click follow on the account in question and voila — access to the inner circle.

If only.

I did exactly that and had no luck. I was blocked within minutes of sending my request.

I guess the absence of any tweets, any other accounts followed, no followers myself, and an egg for a profile image wasn’t convincing enough to the gatekeepers of RBARA.

Back to the drawing board.

Day Two:

This was actually the same day, but it works better for dramatic purposes to give the impression I went off stroking my chin trying to come up with a solution.

I created a new account. This time, as I’m a Brit, I thought maybe I could go down the Brexit route, perhaps an extra layer of authenticity for a British account to be talking British issues.

I added a Union Jack Flag as my profile picture. Wrote some nonsense like “We want Brexit now”, as my profile description, and named the account BrexitForBritain* (*not the actual name I used).

Then I sent a tweet, which I believe went something like: “If Teresa (sic) May cant (sic) do Brexit proprly (sic) we shud get Boris to be prime minsiter (sic)” (minus the sics — I wanted to make it authentic, spelling mistakes and all).

Then I followed a couple of ultra-right-wing bastard accounts — Paul Joseph Watson and Katie Hopkins, I think — and waited for a follower to arrive.

No follower arrived after a day (actually a day this time) and so I decided to bite the bullet and try following RBARA again.

Day Three:

No response from RBARA after 24 hours. But I hadn’t been blocked either, so things were moving in the right direction.

Still, I was starting to get frustrated. Why wouldn’t this fake racist bastard let me follow them?

I decided to start again from scratch.

New account. This time, I thought outside the box from the get-go.

It was time to pretend to be a bot myself.

You see (and I should have thought of this before), the reason I wanted access RBARA’s followers was that I’d been given some information that this was a hotbed account of fake account orchestration — like the mothership of Russian disinformation on Twitter.

Supposedly, this account tweets some nonsense out, and then 50,000 fake accounts following it retweet and like until the propaganda has spread like avian flu.

Now, if I was able to convince the gatekeepers of RBARA that I too was a fake account, a fellow bot, out to help spread the disinformation, then maybe I’d be given access to the follower list I so desired.

So, first up, I needed a bot account name. I decided to stick with the Brexit theme, but then add a string of random numbers afterwards. This is the bot hallmark after all, and if anyone was going to know that, it would be the gatekeepers of the big daddy bot.

Now, I decided to go off-piste with the profile pic. A Union Flag, but one that was sort of singed — like I believe (or I want the people following my bot to believe) that Britain (and it’s flag) is under threat or something. Adds a nice layer of backstory.

Next, the tagline. “Let’s leave now. Free Tommy” was a nice touch I thought. All these ridiculous alt-righters had become obsessed with the “plight” of Tommy Robinson at this time. Going with Tommy, rather than Tommy Robinson, seemed like a way to imply I knew my alt-right shit. Familiar, like.

Now, account set up, how would a bot account behave, I wondered.

Well, for a start, it’d embark on a campaign of mass following.

So, because of some previous research into this online subculture, I decided to create a script that followed and unfollowed as many accounts with the ❌ in their name as Twitter would allow at a single time.

That started a chain reaction. Suddenly I started pulling in followers.

But then I began to worry. What if these newfound followers went onto my profile and saw it was a tweet-free zone? Would I be rumbled?

So I created another script (I say script, I used IFTTT) to constantly subtweet and retweet the rambling nonsense of a couple of smaller but very active alt-right accounts.

My timeline began to fill up within minutes with all sorts of bile of the pro-Brexit, pro-Trump variety. It was a sight to behold, I have to say.

Day Four/Five/Six/Whatever — the actual day isn’t important.

I let these scripts (I’m going to keep saying that as it makes me sound more impressive - like I’m some “hacker” from a bad 90s movie) run for a few more days.

By the end of a week or so, I was up to around 400 followers, and “I’d” sent out around 1000 tweets.

To all intents and purposes, to any outside gaze, I’d become a fully-fledged alt-right Twitter bot. My Mum would be so proud.

Finally, with my new found position as a member of this awful community, I decided to go for it, once more, and click follow on RBARA.

Within minutes, I got the result I was looking for, the holy grail of alt-right-bot-shithousery — I got accepted as a follower of RBARA.

It’s strange when you achieve something you’ve been aiming towards for so long (well, 4 or 5 days) and so for a moment, I sat back and basked in the glow of my own sneaky ego.

Then I decided to jump in.

Firstly, I pulled out the original info I wanted, the follower list. I’m currently going through this and examining for bots and other oddities and will publish my findings at a later date.

So next, while I was in, it seemed silly not to delve a bit deeper.

Day Something or Other

The first revelation I had was that if an account is locked, by default, their tweets are unable to be retweeted. I mean, I should have probably known that already, but I didn’t.

So how is this account spreading its message, if not through retweets?

The answer appears to lie in the majority of content this account pumps out — mostly retweets of other, real, alt-right commentators like David Vance, Katie Hopkins, and articles from places like Breitbart, The Express and the MailOnline.

These retweets aren’t protected, and so they continue to spread through RBARA’s audience.

The other tactic this account uses to clearly great effect is the sheer volume of content it chucks out. On average, it appears to be tweeting between two and four times an hour, if not more, with over 150,000 tweets total. That is an insane amount of bile to be throwing out into the Twittersphere — throw enough shit, as they say.

My journey down the rabbit hole was only just beginning, and what was interesting wasn’t so much what I was finding out about the RBARA account, but rather what was happening to my own fake account in the process.

With my real Twitter account, I probably tweet somewhere in the region of three or four times a day. In terms of notifications, we’re looking at maybe twice that a day. And on my real account, I have about four times as many followers as this fake one.

The last day I checked my fake account, bear in mind I’d checked it the day before, I had 33 notifications.

Mostly retweets and follows of whatever horrible shite my “script” had caused me to retweet, but occasionally I was receiving comments and messages too.

Make no mistake, I may have been impersonating a bot, but the majority of people interacting with me didn’t appear to notice.

That’s quite a scary thought, and it puts things into perspective.

This is a hugely active subculture on Twitter and social media; my experience is that it’s significantly more active than the liberal/left community even.

And this a community either unaware or more than happy with the fact that they’re often interacting with bots and fake accounts —all that matters is the message agrees with their agenda.

That is a community ripe for exploitation by nefarious actors (ahem Putin ahem).

One other thing I learnt from this experience. Brexiters, Trumpers etc. On the whole, they are really full of hate.

I know that might seem like an obvious statement, but it is worth scrutinising.

The sheer volume of anger and bile that poured through almost all the content being created and shared by these accounts is staggering.

I’m not saying this is an issue solely limited to the alt-right community, but my goodness are they making a good fist of being defined by it.

And so overall, having experimented with becoming an alt-right bot, this is the lesson that is most poignant to me — these people (the real people behind the accounts) are so fucking angry and hateful.

That is really sad, and it is something we need to try and fix. How we do that, I don't know.

I’ve kept both my account and the RBARA account as anonymous as I could throughout this piece, not because I feel any compulsion to protect anyone, but because my investigations into this world are still ongoing, and I don’t want to compromise the access I’ve managed to gain. I will be publishing further pieces on this sad, angry, strange world in due course.