I grew up in Tuolumne County in California's Sierra Nevada foothill region. My old stomping grounds have been in the news lately, mostly because they've been on fire. As the Rim fire has grown to 400 square miles in size, making it the third largest fire in state history, I've been following along with reports on Twitter using the hashtag #rimfire.
Along the way, I accidentally discovered a creepy collection of fake Twitter accounts. These aren't the Twitter accounts that you usually think of as belonging to spammers: pictures of attractive women (or generic Twitter egg icons) spewing out the same link to hundreds or thousands of people. Instead, they're accounts that, on the surface, look like ones operated by real people, except that they keep tweeting the same out-of-date tweet over and over again, like a creepy Doctor Who monster.
School's in session, so let the bots run free
During the height of the Rim fire, numerous Tuolumne County schools closed due to smoke from the fire or the threat of evacuation. But they've all been open since early September. At some point in middle to late August, with smoke choking the county, someone helpfully tweeted: "#TuolumneCounty Summerville High & Elementary are closed as well as Soulsbyville Elementary due to the air quality of the #rimfire."
And that's when it happened. This tweet was captured (presumably because of its use of the trending hashtag #rimfire) and became fodder for automated reposting by endless fake Twitter accounts.
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