Thread by @conspirator0

None of these people exist (the faces are all GAN-generated), but that's not stopping them from advertising random musicians to their new followers.

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

cc: @ZellaQuixote

The accounts depicted in the previous tweet are part of a network of (at least) 1393 accounts, most of which were created in large batches in June/July 2021. All have GAN-generated faces as their profile pics (all female) and female display names.

Unmodified GAN-generated face pics (so far) have the telltale trait that the primary facial features (particularly the eyes) are rendered in the same location on each image. This property becomes quite visible when the images are blended together.

Despite the fact that one can generate new GAN-generated face pics to one's heart's content, 22 of the images used by this network show up on multiple accounts (@RamonaMoore1 and @PhyllisCave4, for example).

This network does two things: tweet and retweet. Retweets comprise the bulk of its output (95605 of 96809 tweets, 99.4%), and are mostly of music-related content. The network's original tweets are music promotion directed at new followers.

Thus far, this network has (allegedly) posted all of its tweets via the Twitter Web App, with the exception of a single tweet that was somehow sent via the Twitter Web Client (the old version of the Twitter website).

Normally, the timestamps of tweets sent via the Twitter Web App are roughly evenly distributed across all 60 seconds. This is not so with the tweets posted by this network, which were disproportionately sent between 45 and 49 seconds into the minute in which they were tweeted.

One more pattern: the network alternates between high volume 12 hour periods of only retweeting and low volume 12 hour periods of only posting original tweets. The combination of these anomalies suggest the accounts are automated, despite tweeting via the Twitter Web App.

We saw a network very similar to this back in May 2021. (All the accounts in the previous network are now suspended.)

Update: a few people replied to this thread indicating that they had received DMs from accounts in this network. For science, we had @DrunkAlexJones follow a few of the accounts, and indeed received a bunch of very similar-looking DMs promoting music.

H/T @dorkingbeauty1 for the lead.