Are 1000 "realistic looking followers" for the low, low price of $2 from @thou_followers and its associated website (thousandfollowers(dot)com) worth the price? Spoiler: probably not, and as always, don't click the link. #SaturdaySpam
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Conveniently, one need look no further than @thou_followers's own followers to study its inventory. 17957 of its 17963 followers were created in batches, have never liked a tweet, and followed @thou_followers in order of creation date.
As far as we can tell, these 17957 accounts comprise the entire botnet. They were created in batches starting in late May 2020 and continuing through the present day (most recent batch is from August 13, 2020), and have few or no tweets of their own.
Those members of the botnet that have tweeted (2004 of 17957 accounts) hypothetically sent all of their tweets via the Twitter Web App. Tweets are repeated across accounts, although only few accounts in the network have tweeted any given tweet.
8727 of the 17957 accounts in this fake follower botnet use GAN-generated face pics similar to those produced by thispersondoesnotexist(dot)com. Anime and cat pics are also common.
Here's an animated visualization of blending the GAN-generated pics together. As we've observed previously, the prominent facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same location on each image.
(We used the technique described in this thread combined with manual inspection to identify and count the GAN-generated faces. It's possible we missed some due to the sheer number of pictures.)
What accounts does this fake follower botnet follow? Weirldly, a lot of the accounts it follows are accounts with Turkish names/bios created earlier this year that claim to reside in Italy. They haven't yet done much, but we plan to keep an eye on them.
Footnote: using AI to generate thousands of face pics for one's botnet in a hurry does have some downsides in terms of quality control.
Update: @thou_followers is creating another batch of bots, and is having them mass follow us (as well as several of our followers). Buying and selling followers is a TOS violation, and we suspect this is an act of retaliation by @thou_followers for analyzing its operation.
Update the second: @thou_followers has been suspended.
