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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Oct 14, 2020 • 11 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

Just for fun, we started digging through the accounts followed by 60 popular verified #MAGA accounts to see what there is to see. We found one weird thing that stuck out like a sore thumb (and will add more if/when we find more). . .

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@ScottIngwers

Meet @ScottIngwers. This account has never tweeted, never liked any tweets, has no bio, and uses a default profile pic. Despite this, its 342 followers include @DonaldJTrumpJr, @IvankaTrump, and @EricTrump.

@ScottIngwers

Since the account has no content, there's not really much about @ScottIngwers to analyze, but we did notice that despite the account being totally empty, it's picked up followers in a variety of languages.

@ScottIngwers

(also possibly interesting, one of @ScottIngwers protected followers, @wn_defenders, has the "1488" white supremacist dog whistle in its profile)

(possible partial explanation - as several folks have pointed out, there is a Trump Hotels executive with the same name as the empty account)

@PatriotCELL

Moving on, four of the verified #MAGA accounts follow members of the Mad World News botnet:

• @PatriotCELL is followed by @DineshDSouza, @LisaMarieBoothe, @chuckwoolery, and @drdavidsamadi

• @The4GNet is followed by @LisaMarieBoothe and @chuckwoolery

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1224434492514824193

@CassandraRules

Next up, two of the prominent verified #MAGA accounts (@CassandraRules and @johncardillo) follow perennial bot magnet @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN.

Some recent threads on Klyushin's account:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1109255003187888128

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1300599653780598786

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1291345647229173760

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1309668288885149701

@DineshDSouza

Four of the large blue-check #MAGA accounts (@DineshDSouza, @ChanelRion, @ScottBaio, and @gatewaypundit) follow conspiracy theory dispenser @GregRubini, an account that repeatedly claims without evidence to have "sources" in Trump's inner circle.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1227062755687092224

Moving on, former NYC mayor and current #MAGA propaganda maven @RudyGiulian follows only 522 Twitter accounts. The first 7 are Trump, Pence, two Trump campaign accounts, and Trump's children, suggesting that Giuliani joined Twitter for the purpose of promoting Trump's candidacy.

@NealeyMaxwell

Giuliani also follows @NealeyMaxwell, an account with a default pic, no bio, and 58 followers. In addition to pushing Giuliani's #MAGA propaganda, this account has a bunch of hydroxycholoroquine/herd immunity COVID-19 tweets, and likes Tulsi Gabbard but attacks other Democrats.

@RudyGiuliani

*oops, tag is wrong, should be @RudyGiuliani of course.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1317492018847928321

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Mar 8

Just for fun, I decided to search Amazon for books about cryptocurrency a couple days ago. The first result that popped up was a sponsored listing for a book series by an "author" with a GAN-generated face, "Scott Jenkins".

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Alleged author "Scott Jenkins" is allegedly published by publishing company Tigress Publishing, which also publishes two other authors with GAN-generated faces, "Morgan Reid" and "Susan Jeffries". (A fourth author uses a photo of unknown origin.)

As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN-generated faces, the facial feature positioning is extremely consistent between the three alleged author images. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.

Read 5 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Feb 8

The people in these Facebook posts have been carving intricate wooden sculptures and baking massive loaves of bread shaped like bunnies, but nobody appreciates their work. That's not surprising, since both the "people" and their "work" are AI-generated images.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

In the last several days, Facebook's algorithm has served me posts of this sort from 18 different accounts that recycle many of the same AI-generated images. Six of these accounts have been renamed at least once.

The AI-generated images posted by these accounts include the aforementioned sculptures, sad birthdays, soldiers holding up cardboard signs with spelling errors, and farm scenes.

The common element: some sort of emotional appeal to real humans viewing the content.

Read 7 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 24

As Bluesky approaches 30 million users, people who run spam-for-hire operations are taking note. Here's a look at a network of fake Bluesky accounts associated with a spam operation that provides fake followers for multiple platforms.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This fake follower network consists of 8070 Bluesky accounts created between Nov 30 and Dec 30, 2024. None has posted, although some have reposted here and there. Almost all of their biographies are in Portuguese, with the exception of a few whose biographies only contain emoji.

The accounts in this fake follower network use a variety of repeated or otherwise formulaic biographies, some of which are repeated dozens or hundred of times. Some of the biographies begin with unnecessary leading commas, and a few consist entirely of punctuation.

Read 8 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 10

It's presently unclear why, but over the past year someone has created a network of fake Facebook accounts pretending to be employees of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Many of the accounts in this network have GAN-generated faces.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This network consists of (at least) 80 Facebook accounts, 48 of which use StyleGAN-generated faces as profile images. The remaining 32 all use the same image, a real photograph of a random person sitting in an office.

As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN-generated faces, the main facial features (especially the eyes) are in the same position on all 48 AI-generated faces used by the network. This anomaly becomes obvious when the faces are blended together.

Read 6 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Oct 18, 2024

None of these chefs exist, as they're all AI-generated images. This hasn't stopped them from racking up lots of engagement on Facebook by posting AI-generated images of food (and occasional thoughts and prayers), however.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

These "chefs" are part of a network of 18 Facebook pages with names like "Cook Fastly" and "Emily Recipes" that continually post AI-generated images of food. While many of these pages claim to be US-based, they are have admins in Morocco per Facebook's Page Transparency feature.

Between them, these 18 Facebook "chef" pages have posted AI-generated images of food at least 36,000 times in the last five months. Not all of the images are unique; many have been posted repeatedly, sometimes by more than one of the alleged chefs.

Read 7 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Sep 8, 2024

Can simple text generation bots keep sophisticated LLM chatbots like ChatGPT engaged indefinitely? The answer is yes, which has some potentially interesting implications for distinguishing between conversational chatbots and humans.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.substack.com/p/baiting-the-…

For this experiment, four simple chatbots were created:

• a bot that asks the same question over and over
• a bot that replies with random fragments of a work of fiction
• a bot that asks randomly generated questions
• a bot that repeatedly asks "what do you mean by <X>?"

The output of these chatbots was used as input to an LLM chatbot based on the 8B version of the Llama 3.1 model. Three of the four bots were successful at engaging the LLM chatbot in a 1000-message exchange; the only one that failed was the repetitive question bot.