Misleading Repurposing on Twitter
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Twitter allows users to change their screen name and other profile attributes, which allows a malicious user to change their account's identity or purpose while retaining their followers. We present the first large scale and principled study of this phenomenon of misleading account repurposing on Twitter. We analyze two large datasets to understand account repurposing. We find 3,500 repurposed accounts in the Twitter Elections Integrity Datasets. We also find more than 100,000 accounts that have more than 5,000 followers and were active in the first six months of 2020 using Twitter's 1 sample. We analyze a series of common features of repurposed accounts that give us insight into the mechanics of repurposing and into how accounts can come to be repurposed. We also analyze three online markets that facilitate selling and buying Twitter accounts to better understand the effect that repurposing has on the Twitter account market. We provide the dataset of popular accounts that are flagged as repurposed by our framework.
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