Thread by @conspirator0

The 9 accounts promoting monsterfundrise(dot)com discussed in this previous thread have been shut down by Twitter, but 15 new ones have taken their place. As before, their tweets appear be being astroturfed, garnering far more retweets than likes.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1354239670507466753

We downloaded the set of accounts amplifying the monsterfundrise tweets, and noticed that many of the other tweets they retweeted (particularly recent tweets from Punjab, Pakistan governor @ChMSarwar) also received more retweets than likes.

(some background info on the presence of more retweets than likes being a sign of astroturfing - average ratio is more than twice as many likes as retweets)

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1308191759298703362

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1273077086761213952

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1270444715637387266

By exploring these retweets, we found a network of 4419 accounts that appear to have astroturfed many of the same tweets. All follow far more accounts than they have followers, and the majority of the content they amplify receives more retweets than likes.

All of the tweets posted by these 4419 accounts since January 2020 were (allegedly) sent via either the Twitter website or Android app (no iPhone/iPad). Although 3768 of the accounts were created prior to 2020, they have very few tweets prior to that year.

It's possible that the older accounts were recently purchased, hacked, or otherwise repurposed. By comparing the current state of the accounts to various older datasets we had on hand, we discovered that at least 168 have swapped to Turkish display names since March 2020.

Who does this network amplify? Officials from multiple countries turn up, including the aforementioned Punjab, Pakistan governor @ChMSarwar (the most frequent beneficiary), Turkish Minister of Transport @akaraismailoglu, and South African Minister of Transport @MbalulaFikile.

One other interesting detail: 468 of the 3768 accounts in this network created prior to 2020 use GAN-generated profile pics (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to produce fake faces.) None of the newer accounts use GAN pics.

Animated visualization of the 468 GAN-generated face pics used by this network. As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN face pics, the major facial features are always in the same place (especially the eyes).

Aside from facial feature position, another fingerprint of GAN-generated face pics is the presence of visual anomalies like vestigial heads, nonsensical hats, and random blobs. Whoever set up this network didn't put much effort into weeding out the really bad ones. #YouHadOneJob

More on GAN-generated face pics and their use on Twitter (and a few other places) here

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1322704400226394112