The Great Bot Swarm of 2018

This month many of us in the pro-Taiwan community have made the unpleasant discovery that our Twitter accounts are flooded with passive bot followers. They have the same traits -- the account usually has no profile picture, and it was opened in April of 2018. Most of them do not tweet or retweet. Some like this one tweet only one thing again and again.

Twitter has done little, and probably can do little, since the bots are simply rebooted every time they are deleted.

If you look inside them, they typically follow pro-Taiwan (and human rights people working in Asia on other issues according to news reports), Taiwan-based organizations and individuals like myself, non-white (mostly) celebrities, and Edward Snowden, and follow between 70 and 100 people, and have only 1 or 2 followers.

A good example is the bot shown above. It has a profile pic, which is less common, but it follows the familiar pattern: Edward Snowden is mixed with Rihanna and Oprah, and below it follows AmCham Taipei  and Holly Harrington, the well known expat (whom I have great admiration for) who is deeply involved in the startup community in Taipei.

These bots are either Russian or Chinese (a major media organ said SE Asian gov't but that is just pro-Beijing hogwarsh), and my bet is on the latter. Why? Well, when you look at the China Explainer/Apologist/Shill crowd, you don't see these bots.

China Explainer Michael Swaine:

The one profile without a pic was established in 2017, not from the current round of bots. The popular web tabloid SupChina which often parrots the Beijing line....

...yup. No bots. I checked those profiles.

I check the profiles there w/o images, they all date from before 2018 and appear to be real people. China Explainer Evan Osnos has only one bot in his followers that I could see. I didn't see any bots in the followers of Ralph Jennings, who (confusingly) is not pro-China but writes like it.

I also looked at publicly neutral people like Kharis Templeman, who also has no bot followers. He tweets on Taiwan but his personal beliefs (I do not know what they are) remain private. Similarly well-known international politics expert Bonnie Glaser, whose beliefs are also private, is followed by a single bot, who also follows me.

However -- giant caveat -- the China Explainers/Shills tend to be US-based. The bots also do not follow several Taiwan-centered tweeters and organizations who are obviously pro-Taiwan and based in the US (no names because I don't want to draw attention to them). So "not being based in Taiwan" might explain why the bots are ignoring them.

Yet clearly the bots are able to differentiate because UK-based Jon Sullivan, the brilliant scholar who loves Taiwan, is followed by bots. Some of them are like this profile, which has a picture and a birthdate, was formed in April of 2018 and has never tweeted, and has the usual bot following profile: a mix of celebrities and Taiwan sites, and is following less than 100 accounts.

In Taiwan William Foreman, the head of AmCham Taiwan, has a healthy fleet of bots following him. So does J Michael Cole. Aaron Wytze and I regularly swap jokes about our bot followers (my bot profile pics are WAY hotter than yours, Aaron). Some well-known pro-Taiwan people based on Taiwan who are regular tweeters are not followed, however. I checked a few, but again, no names mentioned. There's a high degree of arbitrariness in who gets selected, but clearly an intelligence is directing them because they don't follow people who support China.

Why people like me have many bot followers is a mystery. The bots do not appear to be doing anything, merely crowding up follower spaces. They do not retweet or attack, and appear to be completely passive. But it is deeply unsettling that Twitter cannot/will not filter them out, and that a tiny person like myself of no particular influence is targeted by a major international hacking operation. Is this a practice run for when China attacks Taiwan? Or what?

It's unsettling. And that appears to be the purpose of the Great Bot Swarm of 2018.

FROM THE COMMENTS:
FYI the same thing has been noticed by non-pro-Beijing (sp?) bloggers in Hong Kong recently.

For example, Hemlock on Big Lychee (biglychee.com) commented April 13:

"I have recently been inundated with hundreds of fake ‘followers’ on Twitter, many but not all with Chinese names or profiles. I am not alone: they generally follow Neil deGrasse Tyson, Denise Ho, the Pope, at least one Obama, Jerome Cohen, and (more to the point) many familiar esteemed China/HK/Taiwan journos and commentators (an example). The bots, or whatever they are, don’t seem to do any harm – but you wonder what’s going on. (Maybe they’ll be sold on to spammers?)"
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