Attorney @SidneyPowell1, known for representing Michael Flynn, filing multifarious election-related lawsuits, and overuse of the word "Kraken", has accumulated an impressive 1139718 Twitter followers, more than half of them since election day. We took a look.
At first glance, @SidneyPowell1's followers appear to be largely run-of-the-mill #MAGA and #QAnon accounts, and the hashtags used in their profiles corroborate this. Looking deeper, however, we ran across some interesting anomalies. . .
First off, @SidneyPowell1's Twitter account began its life with an infusion of fake followers from a fake engagement botnet we've previously encountered. (647 of her earliest followers are part of this network.)
Since we've previously analyzed this fake engagement network, we're not going to go into much detail on it here. Like many of the other accounts in the botnet, @SidneyPowell1's early fake followers tweeted using a wide variety of apps, mostly in Russian.
Fast-forward to @SidneyPowell1's recent followers, where there are a couple other things to see. The proportion of her followers since the election with few or no tweets or followers has trended sharply upward, especially since the election.
More interestingly, @SidneyPowell1 has recently seen a sharp uptick in Japanese-language followers. 17092 of her 17926 followers with Japanese display names or biographies (95.3%) followed her after election day, compared to 667259 of 1139718 total followers (58.5%).
Due to the language barrier, we didn't dig too deeply into the content of @SidneyPowell1's Japanese-language followers. We did notice that the account they retweet most often is @realDonaldTrump, however. (Other accounts retweeted: @LLinWood, @epochtimes_jp, @SidneyPowell1.)
We also downloaded @LLinWood's followers. We didn't see any sign of early fake followers, but like @SidneyPowell1 he experienced a sudden post-election influx of Japanese accounts (19351 with Japanese display names or profile biographies). #KrakenWoodWorldTour
We downloaded the most recent 200 tweets from each of @SidneyPowell1 and @LLinWood's followers with Japanese display names/bios. The website they most frequently link is YouTube, with a focus on conspiracy theory videos related to the 2020 US presidential election.
The recent influx of accounts with Japanese display names/bios also shows up in @RudyGiuliani's followers, although it appears to have started on September 11th, 2020 (as opposed to after the November election as was the case with @SidneyPowell1 and @LLinWood's followers).
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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.