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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Feb 6, 2021 • 8 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

What do these eighteen blue-check accounts have in common (other than the profile graphics)? Answer: they're all old accounts that were recently renamed and redecorated, giving the appearance that they are official Baja California Sur government accounts.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@Servicios122

Some examples, accompanied by screenshots of each account's former appearance courtesy of Internet archive:

• @Servicios122 (ID 49774815) was formerly @jess_noons
• @prod121 (ID 142177657) was formerly @AmyOguntala
• @secfin12 (ID 349157648) was formerly @lewaron

Here are the 18 renamed verified accounts that are currently presenting themselves as affiliated with the government of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Most appear to have originally belonged to random US residents, and it is unclear at what point they gained their blue checkmarks.

@FMAR122

In most cases, these accounts deleted all their old tweets as part of the makeover. Some were not as thorough about it as others, such as @FMAR122 which still has tweets from 2015 advertising it as "YOUR #1 POLE PARTY HEADQUARTERS". #YouHadOneJob

@cmendozadavis

Each of these 18 accounts is followed by at least some of the others. Notably, none is followed by the official accounts of the Baja California Sur government or its governor (@GobRCS and @cmendozadavis, the only verified Twitter accounts linked from the BCS government website).

What do these accounts tweet subsequent to their (possibly illicit) makeovers? So far, not much - they mostly retweet real Mexican government and media accounts, and link the sites they claim affiliation with on their profiles.

@GobBCS

* tag is wrong, should be @GobBCS.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1357854489257123840

https://twitter.com/3r1nG/status/1360377834200440836

More here:

https://twitter.com/3r1nG/status/1360377834200440836

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jun 6

Some thoughts on perennial pitfalls in news coverage of social media manipulation that frequently result in reporting on fake accounts/bots/etc being far less accurate and informative than it ought to be...

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.com/p/journalism-i…

The most common problem with news articles about fake accounts: failure to include any examples of fake accounts or evidence of their inauthenticity. Any or all of these headlines might be accurate, but you can't tell from the articles, due to absence of evidence.

A related issue: articles like the "Nearly Half of Biden/Trump's Followers Are Fake" and "Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Bots" pieces base their numbers on closed-source third party tools, which may or may not actually be detecting anything useful.

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Apr 26

Does thanking, praising, or insulting an LLM-based chatbot affect the speed or accuracy of its responses to questions involving basic arithmetic? Let's find out!

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.com/p/how-to-talk-…

For this experiment, Meta’s Llama 3.1 model was asked to add and multiply random numbers between 10 and 100, with six different wordings: polite, rude, obsequious, urgent, and short and long neutral forms. Each combination of math operation and wording was tested 1000 times.

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.

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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.