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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

May 24, 2021 • 7 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

The "Round Year Fun" family of malicious Twitter apps ("My Twitter Family", "My Twitter Crush", etc) began using a new domain name (roundyearfun(dot)me) as of May 1st, 2021. Here's a look at the activity since the switch, and once again: DO NOT USE THESE APPS!

cc: @ZellaQuixote

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1383216080663945219

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1383216598081622017

Using any of the Round Year Fun apps will cause your account to follow and mute a specific set of accounts without your knowledge. If you've already attached one or more of these apps to your account, here are instructions on how to revoke access:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1383216598081622017

We downloaded all available tweets linking to the new Round Year Fun domain, roundyearfun(dot)me, yielding 145599 tweets from 117019 accounts posted via a whopping 870 distinct apps.

The majority of the apps used to post the Round Year Fun tweets are custom apps whose names are variations on "Round Year Fun" or "erasedXXXXXXXX". The "erasedXXXXXXXX" apps are apps that have been shut down by Twitter and were likely "Round Year Fun" variants originally.

The tweets generated by the Round Year Fun apps tag other accounts (your alleged "Twitter family" etc), some of whom go on to try the malicious apps themselves. 67918 of the 117019 accounts (46.6%) with recent Round Year Fun tweets were previously tagged in Round Year Fun tweets.

@MWCampanelli

What accounts do the Round Year Fun apps currently force their users to unwittingly follow? Leading the pack is @MWCampanelli, with at least 16686 Round Year Fun followers since May 1st, 2021, followed by @RickcryptoRick, @j_shap6, and @CRYPTOFIED1.

Here are follow order by creation date plots for the accounts that have recently received large infusions of (involuntary) followers via the Round Year Fun apps. The large red rectangular areas are the follower gains from the apps.

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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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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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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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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.

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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.