Tracking Twitter Botyness using PowerShell

Urgh…

I get all these fake bots following me, and like urgh…

Well, my theory is, anyone who follows more than 1000 people must be a bot, and PowerShell could be hacked together to help me find that list.

Its looking good,

$wc = new-object System.Net.Webclient
$wc.Credentials = new-object System.Net.NetworkCredential “waim”,”MY_PASSWORD_TRY_IT”
$followers = [xml]$wc.DownloadString(“http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?screen_name=waim”)

$friends = [xml]$wc.DownloadString(“http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml?screen_name=waim”)
$friends = $friends.users.user | select -ExpandProperty screen_name

$followers | select screen_name, @{Expression={[int]($_.friends_count)};Name=”Count”},@{Expression={“http://twitter.com/$($_.screen_name)”};Name=”Link”} | sort count | ft -AutoSize

What I did was find my friends list, find my followers list, then find all the followers who are not my friends.

Then, I sort them by number of people they follow

screen_name     Count Link
———–     —– —-
abdrahman82        12 http://twitter.com/abdrahman82
OnlineAlarmClck    38 http://twitter.com/OnlineAlarmClck
madelenej          47 http://twitter.com/madelenej
RedmondHV         152 http://twitter.com/RedmondHV
alexandair        178 http://twitter.com/alexandair
ebgreen           195 http://twitter.com/ebgreen
DrRez             690 http://twitter.com/DrRez
Jerejak           799 http://twitter.com/Jerejak
twirex            912 http://twitter.com/twirex
PaulPetterson    1050 http://twitter.com/PaulPetterson
danphilpott      1211 http://twitter.com/danphilpott
NocturnalJungle  1438 http://twitter.com/NocturnalJungle
SpencerFerguson  1809 http://twitter.com/SpencerFerguson
visiblenet       2001 http://twitter.com/visiblenet
Deskcretary      4668 http://twitter.com/Deskcretary
E_Stampede      15051 http://twitter.com/E_Stampede

Nice list.

The first guy is amy brother in law who is drowned out by the spam bots. Its nice to see him there, so I can add him as a friend

500+ seems to be a threshold, everyone after that is a BOT

alexandair        178 http://twitter.com/alexandair
ebgreen           195 http://twitter.com/ebgreen

Are powershell peeps. They follow a lot, but they also have a lot of followers. A delta might be a better judge of Botyness. Like that word, lets use it in the title

I still havent updated the script to block all the bots. Maybe later, at least now I know who are enemy

If you hear this, you are the resistance,

Waim Brown

Read Full Post »