Star Wars bots, you say? @confusedyoda Toru Hanai/Reuters

Computer scientists at University College London recently felt a disturbance in the force. They 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, ending up with around 6 million English-language accounts. When they plotted their locations on a world 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.

Because so many of the accounts appeared to tweet from uninhabited deserts or ocean, it was obvious that these weren’t real users.


“When we manually looked into the accounts, we noticed that [their tweets were] just random quotations from Star Wars novels,” says Zhou.

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. For example, as well as only tweeting Star Wars quotes, the bots’ tweets specified that they used “Twitter for Windows Phone”. The algorithm returned almost 357,000 positive matches.

Fake accounts, fake followers

All of the accounts were created between June and July 2013. None tweeted more than 11 times and the quotations appear to be chosen at random, sometimes cut off mid-sentence, from 11 Star Wars books. The tweets stopped on 14 July 2013.

If all of these accounts do turn out to be related bots, it would be an unusually large botnet for Twitter, says Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California. “This is yet another example that these platforms can be manipulated,” he says – though he doesn’t feel this case is a threat to Twitter users.

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.

Alternatively, someone may have set up the bots to influence trending Twitter topics, suggests Filippo Menczer at Indiana University Bloomington.

Jon Crowcroft at the University of Cambridge says the botnet may simply have been an experiment by an amateur hacker. “It’s amusing,” he says. “But it’s relatively pointless.”

Journal reference: arXiv:1701.02405