This afternoon, while searching Twitter on the string "Le’Veon Bell" in the wake of his injury, I saw that the live results returned a large number of bot accounts spamming the same headline and link to a story on the site Bleacher Report. [1]<p>A subset of the bot accounts that spammed that story have Bleacher Report URLs in the majority of their links. [2]<p>Bleacher Report is owned by Turner Broadcasting System whose corporate parent is Time Warner.<p>What's going on here?<p>Is it an independent action by a Twitter bot operator unconnected with Bleacher Report? It's hard to believe that an outfit with corporate
roots as deep as Bleacher Report's would stoop to Twitter spam. Has some Bleacher Report employee gone rogue and hired a Twitter bot
spammer to tout BR's articles?<p>How is Twitter supposed to sell advertising when it appears that major potential ad buyers are instead paying spam services?<p>[1] http://imgur.com/a3JbLls<p>[2] http://imgur.com/a3JbLls
Search for recent HN headlines and you'll find the same thing. I guess the idea is to give bots the appearance of representing real users before using them for spamming, fake followers, ... I don't think the linked sites have anything to do with it.