Thread by @conspirator0

It's #Caturday, so here's a freshly-made botnet tweeting cat videos because of course that's a thing.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This botnet consists of 36 accounts created in July 2021. All 36 accounts have links to blogspot blogs on their profiles and GAN-generated profile pics. (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake faces.)

The current generation of GAN-generated face pics (at least unmodified ones) always have the primary facial features (especially the eyes) in the same position on every image. This anomaly becomes visually obvious when the images are blended together.

These accounts have thus far posted two types of tweets:

• Tweets linking YouTube videos, sent via social media automation service @IFTTT
• Generic greetings, sent via the Twitter Web App

The YouTube videos shared by the bots were posted by YouTube accounts whose names match the names of the Twitter accounts, and which use the same GAN-generated face pics. Some (and possibly) all) of the video content is plagiarized.

In addition to the matching YouTube accounts, each Twitter account also has a corresponding Blogspot blog (linked from each account's profile). Each blog has a post claiming to be a "virtual assistant" as well as a link to the same YouTube video as the related Twitter account.

More threads on GAN-generated images and their use on social media linked in this thread:

Update: this botnet has grown in size from 36 accounts to 66 in the time since this thread was initially posted. It has also gained a new behavior: 14 of the accounts have tweeted links to articles on morningbrew(dot)com.

This network continues to grow and now consists of 87 accounts with GAN-generated profile pics. Content continues to be a mix of YouTube videos (posted by YouTube accounts with GAN avatars matching the Twitter accounts) and links to morningbrew(dot)com.