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16 Feb, 5 tweets, 4 min read
It's a great day to look at an Arabic-language pornbot network that uses stolen profile pics. This particular botnet sometimes uses the same pic on multiple accounts, occasionally cropped differently. #MondaySpam

cc: @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 303 accounts created from November 2020 to January 2021, with particularly large batches created on November 13th, November 15th, and December 16th, 2020.
Most of this botnet's content is in Arabic, most of it is retweets, and most of it is (allegedly) sent via the Twitter Web App. The retweets were all sent via the web app, and its original content was posted via Twitter for Advertisers, Twitter Ads, and Tweetdeck.
The botnet's original content (sent via Twitter for Advertisers/Twitter Ads/Tweetdeck) is almost all porn video tweets. The tweets posted via Twitter advertising products also contain links to dodgy-looking X-rated blogspot pages. (As always, be extremely wary of unknown links.)
Who do the accounts in this network retweet? As it turns out, mostly each other. The retweet network consists of five separate clusters of accounts that retweet each other profusely (and do not retweet the members of the other cluster).

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
15 Feb
How does one detect renamed Twitter accounts and find the previous names? There's no surefire way to do it, but here are four methods that sometimes work.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
The first method is to do a Twitter search for old replies to the account in question. Use a search of this form to find replies prior to a given date and make sure to use "Latest" rather than "Top" results.

to:FMAR122 OR @FMAR122 until:2014-01-01
The previous name(s) will show up (sometimes alongside the current name) at the beginning of replies to the account's old tweets. This method doesn't always work, but it seems that when it does work, it works even if the tweets being replied to have been deleted.
Read 11 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
14 Feb
Meet @Dilde97512368, a Twitter account with a GAN-generated profile pic that is followed by lots of other accounts with GAN-generated pics.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake face pics.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote
60 of @Dilde97512368's followers have GAN-generated face pics, but that's not the only pattern. 15 of its followers use cat pics, 7 use anime pics, and some of the pics that are neither GAN faces, cats, nor anime pics are repeated across two or three of its followers.
We explored the follower networks of @Dilde97512368's followers, and found a total of 3204 accounts with the same mix of profile pics (anime, cats, GAN-generated faces, and repeated images), all created January 25th or later.
Read 14 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
12 Feb
Why does Venezuelan government account @Mippcivzla get so many more retweets than likes on its tweets? #AstroturfFriday

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Answer: @Mippcivzla's tweets (and those of a few other large Venezuelan accounts) are being retweeted by a network of 2454 accounts, all allegedly using the Twitter Android app. These accounts post almost no original content (99.6% percent of their tweets are retweets).
These accounts have all retweeted hundreds of tweets or more, but have liked few or none. The content they boost reflects this - 98.6% of the tweets they retweeted got more retweets than likes. (Based on a set of 5M random tweets, only ~0.8% of tweets get more RTs than likes.)
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
10 Feb
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
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)


Read 11 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
9 Feb
For a change of pace, here's a look at a network of meme-spamming Indonesian-language bots created at the beginning of the new year. #MondayMotivation

cc: @ZellaQuixote
This botnet consists of 53 accounts, all created on either January 1st or January 3rd, 2021. None has ever liked a tweet or followed an account, and almost all of them have no followers.
These accounts tweet almost exclusively via TweetDeck, with the exception of a small number of early tweets allegedly sent via the Twitter website. They fire off tweetstorms in tandem, and their schedules are all variations on a couple of basic patterns.
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
7 Feb
Twitter permanently banned @gatewaypundit yesterday. With it gone, here's what the retweet network for thegatewaypundit(dot)com looks like: two main clusters (English and Japanese), and the main nodes are @mei98862477, @kirstiealley, and @CassandraRules.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
Japanese-language accounts have been turning up prominently in US-centric right wing Twitter content for a while. Back in January 2020, 23.3% of tweets linking now-defunct QAnon site qmap(dot)pub were in Japanese.
Around the time of the November 2020 US election, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Rudy Giuliani all experienced a large influx of Japanese-language followers. #KrakenWorldTour2020
Read 4 tweets

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