It is known that many Twitter users are bots, which are accounts controlledand sometimes created by computers. Twitter bots can send spam tweets,manipulate public opinion and be used for online fraud. Here we report thediscovery, retrieval, and analysis of the `Star Wars' botnet in Twitter, whichconsists of more than 350,000 bots tweeting random quotations exclusively fromStar Wars novels. The botnet contains a single type of bot, showing exactly the same propertiesthroughout the botnet. It is unusually large, many times larger than otheravailable datasets. It provides a valuable source of ground truth for researchon Twitter bots. We analysed and revealed rich details on how the botnet wasdesigned and created. As of this writing, the Star Wars bots are still alive inTwitter. They have survived since their creation in 2013, despite theincreasing efforts in recent years to detect and remove Twitter bots.We alsoreflect on the `unconventional' way in which we discovered the Star Wars bots,and discuss the current problems and future challenges of Twitter botdetection.
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