These are the accounts used to attack people so that companies think there are millions of people opposed to you stuff. When in fact nobody cares. Rush uncovered this mechanism when they went after him.
There are a lot of spam accounts related to stock tickers.
It is very obvious. Plug in certain stock tickers and you will see the same worded post over and over...usually trying to get you to buy into their stock picking service.
But there are also the kind that are trying to influence the market for pump and dumps..especially penny stocks
If only Rush were alive to see this. His investigation showed there were seven or eight people including a college professor from California who were carrying out massive campaigns against EIB using bots. The bots would tweet his sponsors threatening to boycott their products unless they stopped advertising on his show. Following the Sandra-The-Slut-Fluke flap it got so bad that Rush , who never apologized, was forced to issue a half apology to keep his advertisers from bailing. Rush showed them proof that it was all a hoax. After that Twitter campaigns against his company became less effective. But it brought to light how easily hoaxes could be run on Twitter regarding public opinion.