Attack of the Clusterbots!

Today I said something on Twitter -- jeebus knows what -- that attracted the attention of a few bots. While I'd like to say I regularly log in and block the bots, what usually ends up happening is that I ignore them. However, today, for whatever fickle reason, I decided to go in there and remove them.

I used to be able to tell a bot from a person because they'd have a couple of tweets (normally all the same thing), they'd have a few followers (normally people that didn't understand bots) but followed like 40,000 people or something ridiculous like that.

Well, while trying to identify the bots I noticed something odd. These accounts were being followed but hundreds and even thousands of other accounts! I double checked the account to make sure and from their feeds I could pretty much tell what they were, but I was blown away that there were so many people willing to follow bots! Then it dawned on me... they were being followed by other bots!!!

All these annoying "work from home!" "see my boobs!" "buy viagra" bots were following each other! I mean it makes perfect sense, they're programed to seek out certain words and follow them, so they'd naturally be attracted to each other. All of these thousands upon thousands of bots are slowly finding their way to each other on Twitter and linking together into these MEGA accounts. Ashton Kutcher and Jack Gray won't have anything on them soon, they'll be bigger than Wil Wheaton! WHil WHeaton.

I couldn't help but envision a giant iceberg of linked bots, clustering around each other, floating in cyberspace. Much like zombies, ants on a floating stick, or Reapers in Firefly, as genuine accounts drift by their notice, they all activate and attack. Feasting on the flesh of bandwidth! Terrorizing the Twitterverse! Potentially crashing accounts or flagging them for deactivation due to these mass follow requests.

Could this even happen?! The horror... the horror...

Image lovingly "borrowed" from: http://aipanic.com/zombie-ai/

Amusingly, I meant to end this post here with the above image, however upon following the link I've discovered Zombie PCs... I'm so scared I might poop in my PJs. You should read it.