Thread by @conspirator0

It's Friday, and an armada of Instagram bots named Alex with GAN-generated face pics are promoting a follower sales site. #InstaGANs

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com etc to generate fake face pics.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We found 1311 Instagram accounts with GAN-generated face pics, account names beginning with "alex-", and biographies containing "GET +10000 FOLLOWERS NOW" accompanied by random emoji. (Due to Instagram's lack of a public API, this was done via the website's search future.)

As is the case with unmodified GAN-generated face pics (so far), the major facial features (especially the eyes) are in the same position on each of the 1311 images. This anomaly becomes visually apparent when the images are blended.

GAN-generated face pics have a variety of another anomalies as well, ranging from nonsensical backgrounds, clothing, jewelry, and hats to vestigial heads and random colored blobs on faces. Here are some of the more ridiculous examples from the Instagram botnet.

The bots in the network don't link to the follower sales site directly. Instead, they link to other Instagram accounts (usually @/soc.secrets.promotion) that in turn link the sales site, socsecret(dot)com. (As always, be careful when visiting dodgy sites.)

This site sells followers/likes/views/etc on a variety of social media platforms: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Pinterest. No free trial is presently offered, so we did not test it.

Interestingly, socsecret(dot)com shares an IP address with a whole bunch of other sites selling very similar illicit social media services. Several of them even offer APIs, allowing their customers to automate the purchasing of followers etc.