One of the bots is named AberBluehair. There's something very "how do you do, fellow young people" about that.

    HELLO. THIS IS MARY. I AM A HUMAN WITH SOFT SKIN.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/01/28/move-over-hell

That profile in particular is interesting. The first two tweets appear to be human originated, and date from December 2021. There are no tweets from the account until seven hours ago, and all the tweets after that point are spam.

Several options:

* Spammers creating accounts and posting human posts in advance knowing they'll be used for spam in the future

* Account sold by the actual owner

* Account compromised and repurposed for spamming

I bet it’s all three, but leaning toward more of the last than the other two.

It’s amusing to me that they end each fake reply with a string of four random letters. What better way to scream “I’m a bot”?

I wonder what these strings are. Some sort of an ID? Or maybe to make these tweets sufficiently different from each other to avoid triggering spam detection?

I'd put my money on the second one

I was impersonated on another medium recently. Appending some sort of hash to the end of every message was my first thought as a countermeasure.

(Didn't end up implementing; easier to abandon the platform altogether and deny anything purportedly attributable to me.)