Here's an interesting account: @VishalAParmar, created in May 2021. All but two of its 688 followers were also created in May 2021, over a period of less than 12 hours. #SaturdaySpam
These followers are part of a fake follower botnet created between April 30th and May 29th, 2021. This botnet consists of (at least) 20684 accounts, none of which has ever tweeted. The accounts have random-looking but more or less pronounceable names, usually in all lowercase.
Who does this botnet follow? There's a lot of variety, although most are promotional/commercial accounts of some type. Cryptocurrency/blockchain accounts are a bit of a theme.
Here are follow order by creation date plots for the accounts followed by the largest swathes of the botnet, with the bot followers colored in green. Some of the smaller accounts appear to have almost no genuine followers whatsoever.
Although this botnet has not as of yet posted any tweets of its own, it does like tweets here and there. The majority of the tweets it likes are cryptocurrency tweets, with occasional porn, coupon spam, and a random tweet from the band Chevelle turning up as well.
The accounts in this botnet have repetitive biographies, some of which are used on dozens of accounts (1279 distinct biographies for 20864 accounts, or an average of ~16 accounts with each biography).
As is common with fake follower botnets, the accounts in this network use stolen profile pics. TinEye was generally more effective than Google or Yandex for tracking down other uses of this botnet's pics.
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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...
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.
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!
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.
Results: asking the questions neutrally yielded a faster response than asking politely, rudely, obsequiously, or urgently, even if the neutral prompt was longer. Overall, obsequious math questions took the longest to process, followed by urgent, rude, and polite questions.
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.
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.
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.
The accounts in this fake follower network use a variety of repeated or otherwise formulaic biographies, some of which are repeated dozens or hundred of times. Some of the biographies begin with unnecessary leading commas, and a few consist entirely of punctuation.
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.