Across five political spam incidents, spam constituted 62–73% of all tweets in the Russia, China'12, and Mexico incidents, while Syria had only 6% spam. In the China'12 incident, 1,700 spam accounts (14% of all accounts) generated 600,000 spam tweets (73% of total), with 10 individual accounts each producing over 5,000 tweets before shutdown; in Mexico, 50 accounts sustained 1,000 spam tweets per day throughout the incident.
From 2013-verkamp-five — Five Incidents, One Theme: Twitter Spam as a Weapon to Drown Voices of Protest
· §2, Table 2
· 2013
· Free and Open Communications on the Internet
Implications
High per-account volume (>5,000 tweets) is a more reliable spam signal than account count alone — rate-limit enforcement targeting prolific accounts can be more effective than broad account detection.
Detection systems must be tuned per-incident: Russia required individual-tweet detection (many accounts, few tweets each), while China'12 required per-account volume detection (few accounts, many tweets each).