The wildfires presently burning in the Western USA have given rise to various conspiracy theories claiming that the conflagrations are an organized campaign of arson conducted by antifa, with a side of climate change denialism.
We downloaded recent tweets containing "arson", "arsonist", or "arsonists", yielding 267136 tweets from 169105 accounts. The traffic largely doesn't look automated, but the accounts involved are disproportionately 2020 creations.
Retweet network for recent tweets containing arson/arsonist/arsonists. The largest cluster consists of right-wing accounts, most of which are putting forth the proposition that the wildfires are an act of political violence by antifa.
The media website mostly commonly linked from recent tweets mentioning arson/arsonist(s) is Gateway Pundit, followed by a variety of other right-wing conspiracy sites as well as mainstream local and national news sources.
Gateway Pundit published an article on Sept 10 that (without evidence) described an arson suspect as an "antifa radical". They later edited the article/headline, but the disinfo lives on as 1430 of 1439 tweets containing the headline (99.3%) have the original erroneous version.
One more interesting factor at work in the spread of claims that antifa arsonists are starting wildfires in the Western USA: retweet rooms. We found 292 #MAGA accounts whose tweets/retweets consistently get more retweets than likes among the recent arson/arsonist tweets.
(Background on #Mighty200 retweet rooms and how we determined that frequent tweets with more retweets than likes are a sign of the use of retweet rooms or similar forms of astroturfing)
Here are a few examples of recent arson-related tweets that were likely amplified via #MAGA retweet rooms (note that each got substantially more retweets than likes.)
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It's New Year's Eve, and a bunch of politics enthusiasts with GAN-generated faces are enthusiastically replying to a variety of posts with similarly-worded replies. #NewYearShenaniGANs
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The politics enthusiasts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 575 accounts created between May and December 2023 with GAN-generated faces. Many of their handles, such as @Maairiuieinaaa and @eJooeiaAoneueer, contain long strings of vowels.
@Maairiuieinaaa @eJooeiaAoneueer All 575 of these accounts use StyleGAN-generated faces as profile images. Some of these, such as @MauMoiagaia's profile image, contain a tiny "StyleGAN 2 (Karras et al.)" watermark in the lower right corner.
It's a great day to look at a network of inauthentic accounts that post identical AI art images (with a side of good old fashioned T-shirt spam).
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 24 X accounts. 12 of these accounts were created in the latter half of 2023 and have female avatars, while the other 12 were created in 2013 or earlier and have male avatars.
The 12 accounts with female avatars and 2023 creation dates regularly post AI-generated art images, and these image posts are quickly reposted by other accounts in the network (both female and male). The AI-generated images are often duplicated across accounts.
Meet @ImJamesMiller (permanent ID 1371651462153994242), an account with a GAN-generated face, 172K followers, and no tweets prior to two days ago. What's up with that?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
As it turns out, @ImJamesMiller wasn't always named @ImJamesMiller. In June, the account was named @/IamJimCaviezel in an apparent attempt to impersonate Sound of Freedom actor Jim Caviezel.
@ImJamesMiller Multiple prominent users appear to have accepted the fake Jim Caviezel account as legitimate, including Texas Congressman Brian Babin, right-wing influencer/ex-Game of Thrones blogger Jack Posobiec, and recently indicted ex-Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark.
It's a great day to look at a network of Bluesky spam accounts with randomized names. #SundaySpam
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This spam network consists of (at least) 401 accounts, all of which were created (or added to the Bluesky app view) in August 2023. These accounts do not follow each other; rather, each one follows a small number of popular Bluesky accounts.
The accounts in this network cycle rhythmically between posting three types of content:
• reposts
• posts containing links to news articles
• posts containing links to news articles accompanied by images
Meet @thisisorange, a Twitter account created in February 2022 with a gold "verified organization" badge, thousands of batch-created fake followers, and a couple other interesting traits.
Verified organizations on Twitter can verify affiliated accounts (employees, teams, brand names, etc), which receive blue checkmarks as well as an organization badge (help.twitter.com/en/using-twitt…). The @thisisorange account has thousands of affiliates, mostly cryptocurrency accounts.
How did this come about? The website linked on @thisisorange's profile (orange dot associates) apparently allows one to become an affiliate simply by providing a Twitter account and a cryptocurrency wallet.