Meet @aykacmis, @degismece, @anlamislar, @aykacti, @kayitlii, and @donmedim, a sextet of blue-check verified Twitter accounts created on June 16th, 2021. None has yet tweeted and all have roughly 1000 followers (and mostly the *same* followers).
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Two of these six accounts (@kayitlii and @aykacti) have photographs of people as their profile pics. Despite the presence of the blue verification checkmark, neither image is likely to depict the account holder as both images appear to be stolen.
These six newly-created verified accounts have 977 followers in common. One is @verified (which follows all blue-check verified accounts). The other 976 were all created on June 19th or June 20th, 2021, and all follow the same 190 accounts. #Astroturf
These 976 accounts are part of an astroturf botnet consisting of (at least) 1212 accounts. The network is split into followers, which follow the aforementioned verified accounts as well as other members of the botnet, and followees, which are followed by the other bots.
This botnet uses multiple varieties of GAN-generated profile pics. (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com.)
• 160 fake human faces (all female)
• 169 fake cats
• 183 anime pics
29 of the remaining accounts have default profile pics and most of the others have pics that are used by multiple accounts in the botnet. We've seen networks that combine human, feline, and anime GAN pics with default and duplicate pics before:
Thus far, GAN-generated face pics (at least unmodified ones) always have the major facial features (particularly eyes) in the same position on each image. This is easy to see when one blends the images together:
More on GAN-generated images and their use on Twitter (and other sites) here:
Very few of the accounts in this network have tweeted. The majority of the tweet content is spam in Korean sent via automation service dlvr(dot)it promoting a website. As always, be wary of clicking links to unknown sites posted by dodgy accounts.
Permanent IDs of the empty blue-check accounts followed by this botnet, in case they rename:
@aykacmis 1405267251662622733
@degismece 1405264617023098880
@anlamislar 1405264528024145921
@aykacti 1405263426461503489
@kayitlii 1405262586376040448
@donmedim 1405261641982300161
Update: five of these six dubious verified accounts (along with the majority of the supporting botnet) have been suspended by Twitter. The sixth (@aykacmis) appears to have self-deactivated.
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