They had no interest in public interaction and either wanted a DM, an email or a visit to a website. The common theme that all of these accounts had is that they were trying to get you to contact them privately. They just pumped out fake and repetitive tweets that attracted very few followers (the one above has just 12 despite being active since March 2017). However, most of these accounts didn’t target users directly. One, for example, has been around since October 2014 and has tweeted nearly 13,000 times despite having only 6 followers.Īnother simply alternated between sending out the same public message and (incorrectly) replying to people who used keywords that matched their target. While most of the Twitter spam bots (right now) seem to point back to just one essay mill site, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other essay mills trying to engage on Twitter and doing so in spammy ways. Either way though, the end result is the same, these spam bots are probably generating a decent amount of traffic (and possibly customers) for the site.īut while Superbpaper’s bots seem to make up the lion’s share of the plagiarism spam on Twitter, they aren’t the only ones in the game, other sites are involved as well. Whether these are affiliates acting on Suberbpaper’s behalf or the site acting directly is impossible to tell. That site, in turn promises essays for all all educational levels, ranging from high school through PhD. However, if you click through the links, they all point to the same essay mill site named Superbpaper. Though I started my search looking for “plagiarism free” it’s clear they’ve targeted just about every keyword related to essays and citation one can imagine.Īs for the sites they point to, they all appear to point to different domains. Still, these accounts were very pervasive and hitting on a large number of keywords. None that I observed had launched in the past month.Īll of the accounts were very active, posting multiple times per day and would frequently like and retweet similar accounts, indicating it’s likely a singular network. The vast majority joined between March and April but some went as far back as July 2016. Most of the accounts were new but not incredibly so.

Most contained profile pics of models, names and locations that were from all over the world and mixture of tweets that includes essay mill spam, retweets of other bots and nonsense.

It was a theme that repeated itself over and over again as I checked out the bots. Their accounts, at least in the sample I looked at, are marked more by lower follower/following counts, high tweet counts and, most bizarrely, images of beautiful women. However, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t a problem, especially when they flood legitimate accounts with fake follows.īut it doesn’t seem to be the essay mill bots that appear to be doing the rampant following. This has lead to the rise of some really interesting legitimate bots, but also an army of spam bots.įortunately, spam bots are fairly easy to spot. It’s a service that’s very easy to create bots for, whether your intentions are legitimate or nefarious. However, it is interesting to take a look at the world that is automated Twitter spam for essay mills.

So how serious is this? Probably not very. From behind stolen photos and fake followers, they promise “plagiarism free” and “wholly original” essays, dissertations and research papers. Most notably for our purposes is the pushing of essay mills.Įven now, in the dead of summer, you can find a constant stream of bots pushing essay mill and custom writing services. The problem has grown so serious it’s hurt Twitter’s relationship with advertisers and celebrities alike.īut Twitter spam bots aren’t limited to just pushing cam chats, questionable dating sites and pharmaceuticals, they’ve branched out into other areas as well. and international politics, they are also well known for their commercial activities, peddling everything from scams to pornography. Though much of their focus has been on their role in U.S. Twitter bots have been in the news a great deal lately.

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