Meet @CharlieRies4, @davidsfarrer1, @NeerBernard, @phillipdfrye85, and @PhillipSwanso18, who are apparently a group of happily married dog-loving pro-Biden quintuplets who all joined Twitter in May 2020.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Despite proclaiming support for Joe Biden in their profiles, these accounts have retweeted Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Mitch McConnell more frequently than they have Biden. Almost all of their content is retweets, with a grand total of 3 original tweets to date.
On closer inspection, @CharlieRies4, @davidsfarrer1, @NeerBernard, @phillipdfrye85, and @PhillipSwanso18 aren't actually quintuplets; they're just all using the same picture, most likely an AI-generated face pic from a source such as thispersondoesnotexist(dot)com.
Are these accounts bots? It's hard to say; they tweet via the Twitter website and iPhone app rather than automation apps such as IFTTT, and the volume is low enough that they could easily be human-piloted sockpuppets rather than actual bots (automated accounts.)
We do, however, have a potential piece of evidence that all five accounts are being run from the same internet connection: almost all of their tweets were processed by the same datacenter.
(other threads discussing AI-generated face pics and the use thereof)
Update: some of the accounts described above have been deleted. IDs in case they resurface:
davidsfarrer1 - 1261867679473979393
PhillipSwanso18 - 1261847814335803401
phillipdfrye85 - 1256380343038271488
CharlieRies4 - 1256947989756686337
NeerBernard - 1256371049375182848
davidsfarrer1 - 1261867679473979393
PhillipSwanso18 - 1261847814335803401
phillipdfrye85 - 1256380343038271488
CharlieRies4 - 1256947989756686337
NeerBernard - 1256371049375182848
Who follows these accounts (or rather followed, as they've deactivated themselves for the moment)? Rather oddly for followers of US political accounts, 46.9% tweet primarily in a language other than English. Most are low volume - 2449 of 3170 have tweeted fewer than 100 times.
Interestingly, the accounts that follow(ed) this bot/sock network follow a lot of the same accounts, and they accounts they're following are (by and large) not US accounts; Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan all turn up prominently.
