Thread by @conspirator0

Meet @YannickJongene1, @JitzeKnoppers, @HeijnenJuninho, @DorlandFadil, and @BonneHendrickx, a quintet of accounts created in April 2021 with GAN-generated profile pics. Their interests include being automated and retweeting pretty much the same set of tweets.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Each of the five accounts in this botnet tweets via its own custom automation app, all of which have names beginning with "test" or "testing" and ending in long strings of digits.

The vast majority (90.9%) of this botnet's content is retweets, with replies rounding out the remainder. It mostly retweets and replies to giveaway tweets, generally from cryptocurrency or gaming accounts.

Almost all of the botnet's replies tag other accounts (this is one of the conditions of entering some of the giveaways). It has tagged 31 different accounts to date, with cryptocurrency, game streaming, and sports being the main themes.

The five accounts in this network use GAN-generated profile pics, but there's a twist: the pics have been cropped so that the major facial features no longer align when blended.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com etc)

Shifting the images so that the left eyes line up causes the other facial features to align as well, however. We also found an additional piece of evidence corroborating our belief that these images are GAN-generated. . .

As it turns out, the uncropped versions of all five accounts' profile pics are available from generated.photos, which hosts a library of over 2 million GAN-generated faces. (The site's "anonymize" feature also functions as a reverse image search of its image library.)

Update: all of these accounts have deactivated. Here are their permanent IDs in case they resurface:

@YannickJongene1 1382779056366686213
@JitzeKnoppers 1382414380105621505
@HeijnenJuninho 1382407339903488003
@DorlandFadil 1382740754691407875
@BonneHendrickx 1382425168706990088