did someone hail a taxi?This post is a brief journey back in time to 2019, when multiple Democratic hopefuls were launching their bids for the U.S. presidency, X was still named Twitter, and a network of taxi and real estate-themed social media accounts prolifically boosted political content on the aforementioned platform by automated means. While these accounts theoretically existed to promote a variety of transportation, real estate, and tourism services in Virginia and Washington D.C., they primarily acted as retweet bots, amplifying tweets from random Twitter users based on the hashtags used. Although the majority of these accounts were shut down in late 2019, a few remained online and even continued posting periodically until the free Twitter API was shut down in 2023.at its height, this network consisted of 98 accountsShortly prior to being (mostly) shut down in October 2019, this botnet consisted of at least 98 Twitter accounts, most of which had taxi, real estate, or tourism themes. The majority of these accounts were created in 2018 or 2019, with a batch of new accounts whose names contained the word “flow” being created in September 2019, just a month before the bulk of the network was shut down. As mentioned earlier, many of these accounts had references to locations in Virginia or D.C. in their names or biographies.these accounts used dozens of distinct custom automation appsHow can we tell that these accounts were automated? In this particular case, it was relatively easy to make this determination, since the data…Flashback Friday: Taxi!