OK, time to create a @DrunkAlexJones account on yet another MAGA social media site and stuff. This feature to "import copies of your Twitter" content looks interesting, will definitely test that out.
Suggested follows include NewsMax (which somehow has 905K followers on a platform that just started?) and the verification checkmark appears to be red because of course.
So far it looks like a pretty literal clone of Twitter's user interface (much more similar than Gab or Parler).
So far my GETTR feed consists of copies of @NewsMax tweets from 2015. Quite the platform for urgent breaking news and stuff.
Oh hey, a fake Mike Pence account. Seems like a good follow.
And a fake Trump account, with an uppercase "i" in place of the lowercase "l" in "real", because no one has ever thought of that before.
Let's check out GETTR's amazing search feature. For some reason, searching for "Jason Miller" brings up Miles Guo (Steve Bannon's partner in various propagandalicious activities).
Are there accounts with GAN-generated profile pics fishing for followers on GETTR? It didn't take long to fine at least one, with the totally legit sounding username of "AnalRoberts".
More on GAN-generated images here. (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technology used by thispersondoesnotexist.com etc to generate fake face pics.)
No #CaturdayEve posts on GETTR? What kind of social media site has no cat content? This doesn't bode well for the platform (unless the search is broken, which wouldn't be great either).
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It's a Tuesday in June, and a whole ducking lot of newly-made Twitter accounts are "requesting faucet funds on the #Goerli#Ethereum test network" in a spammy repetitive fashion. #TuesdayAstroturf
These tweets are from a network of (at least) 1281 accounts created between June 22 and June 29, 2021. Each account has tweeted exactly once, and all tweets are identical other that the cryptocurrency wallet address. All tweets were (allegedly) sent via the Twitter Web App.
Each account in the network posted its one and only tweet shortly after being created, with an average of 74 seconds and median of 68 seconds between account creation and tweet time. The longest gap between creation and tweet was slightly over ten minutes.
Follow order by creation date scatter plots can be a useful diagnostic tool for finding anomalies in the followers of Twitter accounts. Here's Python source code for generating such a plot based on a follower list in CSV format.
One sign of inauthentic followers is groups of batch-created accounts that followed en masse. These groups manifest as horizontal streaks on the scatter plot, as seen here with @TWReloaded's followers. (This plot is June 2020 and @TWReloaded's fake followers are now suspended.)
(June 2020 thread on the @TWReloaded fake follower network)
In what is quite possibly one of the least necessary crossovers ever, here's a botnet that mostly spams propaganda about #Xinjiang but very occasionally tweets porn too .
This botnet consists of 183 accounts created between December 2020 and March 2021, mostly in batches. Nearly all of their tweets contain random four letter codes, which we've also seen in a previous Xinjiang propaganda botnet (now suspended):
The accounts in this botnet post almost all of their tweets via Twitter Web App, with very occasional tweets posted via Twitter for Advertisers. All of the Twitter for Advertisers tweets are Arabic-language porn tweets.
The aforementioned six accounts are part of an astroturf botnet consisting of 2841 similarly-named Twitter accounts with repetitive biographies created in May 2021. These accounts (allegedly) send all of their tweets via Twitter for iPhone.
All 2841 accounts in this network use GAN-generated face pics as their profile images.
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com and similar tools to generate fake face pics.)
How does one find astroturf networks? One method is to choose a word or phrase, plot a histogram of the creation dates of accounts tweeting that word/phrase, and look for spikes. Several such spikes show up among accounts with recent tweets containing "casino".
If the spikes in creation dates are the result of someone creating making en masse, batches of similar-looking accounts will show up when one looks at the accounts created during the spikes. Here are some examples from the casino dataset, with possible batches highlighted in red.
The late February and early March batches from the casino dataset all use the same naming scheme, tweet using the same app ("Twitter Web App"), retweet many of the same tweets, and tweet identical tweets on multiple accounts, so these accounts are likely a single operation.
Pro-Bolsonaro accounts are spamming follow trains under a variety of hashtags. Here's a quick look at the network (or network of networks, rather). #PlatformManipulationMonday
To map out Bolsonaro trains, we began with one train hashtag (#ArqueirosPatriotas) and explored the networks of accounts using it to find more. We wound up with 12 hashtags (often used in combination), 16969 trains, and 229795 retweets of trains between April 1 and June 13 2021.
We considered any non-reply tweet containing at least one of the follow train hashtags, at least 10 tags of other accounts, and no substantive additional text content to be train tweets. Over half of the volume (56.1%) is trains listing at least 20 accounts or retweets thereof.