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[Kill Your Masters]

Anyone want to meddle in some elections or try and ruin someones life, spread fake news about disasters like hurricane Maria or mass shootings? Well for around 45-100$ you absolutely can.

It's a longer article so I'll just post some parts, complete one is here:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-bought-a-russian-bot-army-for-under-dollar100

I Bought a Russian Bot Army for Under $100

Got a hundred bucks lying around? Mess with an election. Harass an enemy en masse. Twitter is either powerless to stop you, or won’t say how.

Investigators found that hundreds or thousands of dodgy Twitter accounts with Russian digital fingerprints posted anti-Clinton tweets that frequently contained false information.
A Daily Beast investigation reveals manipulating Twitter is cheap. Really cheap. A review of dodgy marketing companies, botnet owners, and underground forums shows plenty of people are willing to sell the various components needed to run your own political Twitter army for just a few hundred dollars, or sometimes less.

And once your botnet is caught, due to holes in Twitter’s security and sign-up features, it takes only a few minutes to do it all over again.
“It requires very little computing power to fire this stuff out,” Maxim Goncharov, a senior threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro who has studied the trade of social media bots, told The Daily Beast.

One Russian and English language site called Buy Accs offers 1,000 Twitter accounts for $45. To test the service, The Daily Beast bought 1,000 accounts with the pseudo-anonymous digital currency bitcoin.
The Russian accounts are as plain as can be: no avatars, no tweets, and no followers, and date from July and August of this year. But they work, come with functioning email accounts, and can be used to tweet without immediately raising any alarm bells at Twitter. Delivery of the accounts is near instant, and is done largely automatically, with no direct human interaction required.

In one case, it appeared the wave of activity caused Twitter to temporarily lock this reporter’s own account. For those sorts of attacks, The Daily Beast found one Twitter botnet owner on a Russian crime forum selling 100 retweets for 14 rubles, or around 24 cents.

On the Russian underground site offering retweets for cheap, one vendor sells 25,000 to 45,000 proxies spread around the world for $100 a week. It costs $800 a week for ‘exclusive’ servers; meaning you are the only customer using them.

Harass me on twitter with bots if old.

 

[Lunar15]

This is how a lot of online social media advertising works, so it naturally goes that it could be used for anything, like influencing elections.

 

[Kyzer]

Little did we know, that the Facebook and Twitter mixtape rappers of the world held all the power

 

[Booya_base]

To me this sounds like a lot of potential power very cheap, are there good things we could do with this?

 

[Nuts2U]

Let's just buy a ton and use them to spread wholesome memes.

 

[IXI FalcoN]

Social media was a mistake.

 

[Kwhit10]

This is basically very cheap advertising for anyone. Which is why I'm surprised real companies aren't using this more instead of paying for real advertising. Well maybe they are buying real cheap retreats for the promoted posts or something.

 

[7DollarHagane]

I like how this is pitched as a tool used only by right wing extremists to push bullshit.

Literally every large company uses things like this(not necessarily Russian) to inflate their social media presence and make it seem like their company or products are more popular than they actually are.

And if you don't think every political party takes advantage of the vulnerabilities of social media to bot manipulation, you're either being biased or ignorant.

I no longer believe anything about any social media figures or numbers because everybody has been peeing in that pool for a decade inflating numbers.

 

[Skellig Gra]

They should charge a lot more.

 

[cooljeanius]

We should buy a NeoGAF bot army