Rather ironically given its stated interest in "healthy conversations online" and "thriving engaged communities", @OpenWebHQ got many of its early followers from a duo of fake follower botnets. We've seen one of these botnets before; here's a look at the other.
This fake follower botnet consists of 4075 accounts created in large batches in July 2014. All accounts have lowercase names containing underscores, and usually digits as well. All have been dormant since late 2015 but (allegedly) tweeted via "Twitter Web Client" when active.
Who does this fake follower botnet follow? Mostly commercial/promotional accounts belonging to a variety of businesses and entrepreneurs. Most of the accounts followed by the bots tweet primarily in English, although a few Arabic-language accounts turn up as well.
Here are follow order by creation date plots for a bunch of the accounts followed by the botnet. The influx of bot followers shows up as a horizontal streak (highlighted in orange for clarity). Additional streaks related to other botnets are visible in a few of the plots.
The vast majority of this botnet's tweet content is retweets, mostly in English. What little "original" content the network has posted is tweets in Russian that are generally repeated across multiple accounts. (As always, take the Google translations with a grain of salt.)
Who did this botnet retweet back when it was active? As with the accounts it follows, the accounts it retweets are mostly promotional in nature, although they're a different set of accounts than the accounts followed, with something of a focus on tech/social media.
Here's a thread on the other botnet that @OpenWebHQ got some of its early followers from. (Portions of this botnet have been suspended by Twitter.)
12 questions for @TheDailyBeast regarding @JakeLahut's false April 2023 story, "How Ron DeSantis Is Taking a Page Out of Nixon’s Playbook", which (among other things) falsely portrays an AI-generated face as a "sexually graphic meme" of a real child.
@JoannaColes @TracyConnor
First, some background and a couple debunks of the false article, for those unfamiliar with the situation:
1. How did the decision to use serial fabulist Steven Jarvis as a source for this article come about?
2. Was anyone employed by or affiliated with The Daily Beast at the time the article was published aware of Steven Jarvis's extensive history of making false claims?
It's New Year's Eve, and a bunch of politics enthusiasts with GAN-generated faces are enthusiastically replying to a variety of posts with similarly-worded replies. #NewYearShenaniGANs
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The politics enthusiasts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 575 accounts created between May and December 2023 with GAN-generated faces. Many of their handles, such as @Maairiuieinaaa and @eJooeiaAoneueer, contain long strings of vowels.
@Maairiuieinaaa @eJooeiaAoneueer All 575 of these accounts use StyleGAN-generated faces as profile images. Some of these, such as @MauMoiagaia's profile image, contain a tiny "StyleGAN 2 (Karras et al.)" watermark in the lower right corner.
It's a great day to look at a network of inauthentic accounts that post identical AI art images (with a side of good old fashioned T-shirt spam).
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 24 X accounts. 12 of these accounts were created in the latter half of 2023 and have female avatars, while the other 12 were created in 2013 or earlier and have male avatars.
The 12 accounts with female avatars and 2023 creation dates regularly post AI-generated art images, and these image posts are quickly reposted by other accounts in the network (both female and male). The AI-generated images are often duplicated across accounts.
Meet @ImJamesMiller (permanent ID 1371651462153994242), an account with a GAN-generated face, 172K followers, and no tweets prior to two days ago. What's up with that?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
As it turns out, @ImJamesMiller wasn't always named @ImJamesMiller. In June, the account was named @/IamJimCaviezel in an apparent attempt to impersonate Sound of Freedom actor Jim Caviezel.
@ImJamesMiller Multiple prominent users appear to have accepted the fake Jim Caviezel account as legitimate, including Texas Congressman Brian Babin, right-wing influencer/ex-Game of Thrones blogger Jack Posobiec, and recently indicted ex-Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark.
It's a great day to look at a network of Bluesky spam accounts with randomized names. #SundaySpam
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This spam network consists of (at least) 401 accounts, all of which were created (or added to the Bluesky app view) in August 2023. These accounts do not follow each other; rather, each one follows a small number of popular Bluesky accounts.
The accounts in this network cycle rhythmically between posting three types of content:
• reposts
• posts containing links to news articles
• posts containing links to news articles accompanied by images