We've previously documented that the "Round Year Fun" apps ("My Twitter Family" etc) force you to follow other accounts without your knowledge. Interestingly, the main Round Year Fun website shares an IP address with a website that sells Twitter followers.
The follower sales website in question (realactivefollowers(dot)com) offers a trifecta of shady Twitter-related services: you can buy followers, likes, and even developer accounts (which enables aspiring botmakers to bypass the normal approval process, among other things).
Realactivefollowers(dot)com also offers a free trial of 50 followers. We had @DrunkAlexJones take advantage of this offer with the goal of testing the hypothesis that the followers being sold on this website are unwitting users of the Round Year Fun apps.
Within a few hours, @DrunkAlexJones experienced an infusion of new followers, most of which indeed have tweets posted via one or more of the Round Year Fun apps. (We were unable to check a few of the accounts as they are presently in protected status.)
If you've already used one or more of the Round Year Fun apps, here are instructions on how to revoke their access to your account:
Final opsec note: we regard both of the websites mentioned in this thread as potentially unsafe and used Tor to visit both of them. We recommend anyone researching sites that may be malicious take similar precautions.
Update - both Round Year Fun and the realactivefollowers(dot)com were offline briefly after losing their original domain registration and hosting. Unfortunately, both sites are now back and hosted by @DreamHost.
Here's a table of the accounts with the largest number of recent (and involuntary) Round Year Fun followers, based on the last 48 hours' worth of Round Year Fun tweets. There's a lot of variety, but cryptocurrency does seem to be a repeated theme.
Update: found some posts on Black Hat World forums related to Round Year Fun/realactivefollowers(dot)com. A user named silentwandererr is promoting realactivefollowers(dot)com and claims to "have an unlimited amount of Twitter API keys".
None of these chefs exist, as they're all AI-generated images. This hasn't stopped them from racking up lots of engagement on Facebook by posting AI-generated images of food (and occasional thoughts and prayers), however.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
These "chefs" are part of a network of 18 Facebook pages with names like "Cook Fastly" and "Emily Recipes" that continually post AI-generated images of food. While many of these pages claim to be US-based, they are have admins in Morocco per Facebook's Page Transparency feature.
Between them, these 18 Facebook "chef" pages have posted AI-generated images of food at least 36,000 times in the last five months. Not all of the images are unique; many have been posted repeatedly, sometimes by more than one of the alleged chefs.
Can simple text generation bots keep sophisticated LLM chatbots like ChatGPT engaged indefinitely? The answer is yes, which has some potentially interesting implications for distinguishing between conversational chatbots and humans.
For this experiment, four simple chatbots were created:
• a bot that asks the same question over and over
• a bot that replies with random fragments of a work of fiction
• a bot that asks randomly generated questions
• a bot that repeatedly asks "what do you mean by <X>?"
The output of these chatbots was used as input to an LLM chatbot based on the 8B version of the Llama 3.1 model. Three of the four bots were successful at engaging the LLM chatbot in a 1000-message exchange; the only one that failed was the repetitive question bot.
The spammers behind the "Barndominium Gallery" Facebook page have branched out into AI-generated video and started a YouTube channel with the catchy name "AY CUSTOM HOME". The results are just about as craptastic as you'd expect.
In this synthetically generated aerial video of a (nonexistent) barndominium under construction, the geometry of the roof changes, a blue building appears, and a tree vanishes, all in the course of just three seconds.
This AI-generated barndominium features a long AI-generated porch with some chairs on it. Exactly how many chairs there are depends on what angle you look at it from, however, as the chair on the left splits into three chairs as the camera pans.
Some observations regarding @Botted_Likes (permanent ID 1459592225952649221)...
First, "viral posts which don't result in follower growth and have very little engagement in the reply section" is not a useful heuristic for detecting botted likes. Why not?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
"Viral posts that do not result in follower growth" is not a valid test for botting, because posts from large accounts often go viral among the large account's existing followers but do not reach other audiences, resulting in high like/repost counts but little/no follower growth.
"Very little engagement in the reply section" doesn't work for multiple reasons (some topics spur debate and some don't, some people restrict replies, etc)
Hilariously, @Botted_Likes seems to be ignoring their own criteria, as many of the posts they feature have tons of replies.
As with the banned @emywinst account, the @kamala_wins47 account farms engagement by reposting other people's videos, accompanied by bogus claims that the videos have been deleted from Twitter. These video posts frequently garner massive view counts.
@Emywinst @kamala_wins47 The operator of the @kamala_wins47 account generally follows up these viral video posts with one or more replies advertising T-shirts sold on bestusatee(dot)com. This strategy is identical to that used by the banned @emywinst account.
What's up with all these similarly-worded enthusiastic posts about a Pierre Poilievre rally in Kirkland Lake, and are they all from accounts that are less than a month old? (Spoiler: yes, they are.) #Spamtastic
cc: @ZellaQuixote
An X search for "Pierre Poilievre", "Kirkland Lake", and "refreshing" performed on August 4th, 2024 turned up 151 posts from 151 accounts. All are new accounts, with the oldest having been created less than a month ago, on July 7th, 2024. (Some have since been suspended by X.)
The most intense period of activity for this group of accounts was on August 3rd, 2024, when the repetitive posts about the Poilievre rally were posted. Each account also has at least one earlier post on a random topic; some of these older posts seem to cut off abruptly.