Do you want to pay complete strangers on the Internet (whose qualifications and skills you know nothing about) to do your homework for you? There's a spam network for that. #FridayFeeling
By searching for the repeated "Hire us to do your <list of homework topics>" tweets shown in the previous collage and exploring the networks of the resulting accounts, we found 300 accounts posting repetitive tweets offering homework/essay writing services for hire.
The accounts in the network (allegedly) send the majority of their tweets via the Twitter Android app, although a number of other apps show up as well. Most tweets are either original tweets or replies (very few retweets or quote tweets).
The original tweets and replies posted by this network are highly repetitive, with the same tweets and replies duplicated dozens or hundreds of times across many accounts. The repeated tweets are all offers to do other people's homework assignments in exchange for payment.
The accounts in this network primarily post their spammy replies to tweets containing words like "essay", "assignment", and "homework". They reply quickly, with the median time between the original tweet and the reply being just over two minutes (129.1 seconds, to be precise).
These accounts don't retweet much, and when they do retweet they're usually retweeting each other's spam - 172 of the 300 accounts have retweeted or been retweeted by other members of the network within their last 3200 tweets.
The homework/essay writing services spammers also follow each other profusely, with 264 of the 300 accounts having a follow connection with at least one (and usually many) of the other homework spammers.
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None of these cats exist. All are GAN-generated images obtained from thiscatdoesnotexist.com. Can we come up with a way to detect GAN-generated cat pics? #CaturdayShenaniGANs
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used to create the images)
For this project, we used the following datasets (all images 512x512):
• 2000 GAN-generated cats from thiscatdoesnotexist.com
• 1195 real cat faces, cropped from images at kaggle.com/crawford/cat-d…
• a test set of 1000 GAN-generated and 1000 real cats (same sources as above)
Unlike the GAN-generated human face pics provided by thispersondoesnotexist.com etc, the placement of the major facial features on the GAN-generated cat pics from thiscatdoesnotexist.com varies from image to image. There are other anomalies in the fake cat pics, however. . .
Is astroturfing with HootSuite still a thing in April 2021? It sure looks that way - we found a network (or possibly two networks) using HootSuite for synchronized retweets, which the accounts then undo after a few hours. #Lobsterfest
First, here's a thread with some background on tweetdecking, the form of astroturfing this network engages in, which involves groups of accounts that retweet the same tweets at the same time, and then undo their retweets after the tweets go viral.
We found 28 accounts that appear to be using the Hootsuite app for astroturfing. We found two separate groups (each amplifying its own lineup of tweets), one consisting of 18 accounts and one consisting of 10 accounts. The larger group appears to undo their retweets more quickly.
Meet @BlancaMatos13, a four-week old Twitter account with a penchant for using stolen photos and a distaste for Ecuadorian presidential candidate Andrés Arauz. Unsurprisingly, this account is not a solo act.
The @BlancaMatos13 account is part of a network of (at least) 63 accounts created in batches in March 2021 that all tweet almost exclusively via TweetDeck and have Ecuador as their profile location. Most operate on very similar schedules.
This network is likely using TweetDeck's scheduling feature, which disproportionately posts its tweets during the first second of the minute for which they are scheduled. (It's also possible that TweetDeck is being automated using other software with similar scheduling behavior).
What's with all these recently-created accounts with variations on "Selected Items. Deals. Product Information. Daily Updated. (eBay Links)" in their profiles?
Answer: these accounts are part of a spam botnet consisting of 73 accounts created between October 2020 and March 2021 (most of them in February or March 2021). All the accounts in this botnet are named after various products (automotive supplies are a frequent theme).
The bots in this network do all of their tweeting via automation service dlvr(dot)it, with most of the accounts being active round-the-clock. The network has tweeted 123037 times thus far, with almost all of the volume in February and March 2020.
Meet @coshdisme10853 (and its thirty thousand automated siblings). Back in 2015 and 2016, this account was tweeting in Spanish, but it went to sleep for a few years and recently woke up and started retweeting English cryptocurrency tweets. #SundaySpam
The @coshdisme10853 account is part of a botnet consisting of 31014 accounts created back in May 2014. Accounts were created in batches and followed the big accounts they follow en masse. (Each bot follows 20-30 or so of the other bots in the network).
Who does this botnet follow? Primarily Spanish-language accounts (mostly Mexican public figures and brand accounts), with @Chertorivski, @MaruchanRamenMx and @MaruchanMx at the top of the list. (We believe that this is the first botnet we've found following a ramen company.)
By reverse image searching a GAN-generated face pic (i.e. the "faces" produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com), one can often find Twitter accounts with GAN-generated profile pics. Today's search led to a massive botnet with a bit of everything. #ThursdayShenaniGANs
This botnet consists of 16512 accounts, created in batches between February 18th and March 21st, 2021. All either follow or are followed by dozens or hundreds of other members of the botnet (and by very few accounts that are not part of the botnet).
The bots in this network are grouped into clusters of a few hundred accounts each that follow or are followed by many other accounts within their cluster. The accounts mostly don't follow accounts in other clusters, but do reply to them.