It's a day ending in "y", and a swarm of accounts with GAN-generated face pics is spamming utter nonsense. #YouWontSeeThesePhrasesOnWheelOfFortune #DictionaryShenaniGANs

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

cc @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 99 accounts, created between January and May 2021. All have first + last name combinations as their display name, handles that match their display names, and all have GAN-generated face images as their profile pics.
As is the case with unmodified GAN-generated face pics (so far), the primary facial features (especially the eyes) are in the same location on all 99 images. This anomaly becomes obvious when one blends the images together.
More on GAN-generated images and their use on Twitter (and elsewhere) in this thread of threads:
This network sends all of tweets via the Twitter Web App (allegedly). Tweets are a mix of retweets and replies, with a recent spike in replies with attached images of fake Elon Musk tweets. All replies consist of between two and eleven random English words.
This botnet has so far posted 6726 random gibberish replies, using a total of 995 distinct words. The most frequently used words are "second" and "may" (56 occurrences each), while "kill" is the rarest (14 occurrences).
What does this botnet retweet and reply to? Mostly large news/media accounts, from a variety of countries and in a variety of languages. Sports news is a recurring theme.

The set of accounts the bots follow is somewhat different, and has something of a focus on Saudi Arabia.
H/T @EJGibney/@FakeDrSebaceous for the lead.

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More from @conspirator0

6 Jul
TFW you go to sleep in 2015 tweeting in Spanish and wake up in 2021 as an "Elon" account, complete with @ElonMusk's current (as of July 6, 2021) profile pic. #RepurposedAccounts #LifeComesAtYouFast

cc: @ZellaQuixote
The recently awakened Elons are part of a larger network of 576 accounts created in May 2014. All accounts went dormant in late 2015, but some of them woke back up in 2021. Old tweets are almost all in Spanish, whereas new tweets are a mix of English, Indonesian, and Japanese.
The old Spanish tweets from these accounts are highly repetitive, with many tweets duplicated verbatim on dozens of accounts. Those of the accounts that are still dormant have similar names and tweet counts, and fewer than three likes (most have zero).
Read 9 tweets
3 Jul
It's a Saturday, which is a great day to look at a long-dormant botnet following @SamyDindane, creator of the HypeFury Twitter automation software.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
We found 110 batch-created accounts (made in 2011) among @SamyDindane's early followers. To find the rest of the network, we downloaded the followers of other accounts followed by those 110 accounts and looked for additional batch-created accounts from the same time period.
The batches show up as horizontal streaks on follow order by creation date plots of the accounts they follow. This slideshow shows some examples, with the batch-created accounts highlighted in red.
Read 8 tweets
1 Jul
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.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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).
Read 13 tweets
29 Jun
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

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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.
Read 5 tweets
26 Jun
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.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
pastebin.com/KqsTs7yZ
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)
Read 8 tweets
24 Jun
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 .

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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.
Read 8 tweets

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