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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jul 19, 2021 • 9 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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@El6YUlRJVNEFutr

Meet @El6YUlRJVNEFutr (permanent ID 1412134274762002436). Despite having been created just two weeks ago and having almost no content, it has somehow accumulated a large following consisting almost entirely of accounts that are at least seven years old.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@El6YUlRJVNEFutr

Weirdly, almost all of @El6YUlRJVNEFutr's followers are older accounts, created in 2013 or earlier. The near-total absence of accounts that are even remotely new is a sign that this follower growth is extremely unlikely to be organic.

These accounts are part of a bulk follow network that followed a variety of accounts en masse over the last few weeks. (The followers from the network are highlighted in orange on the follow order by date range plots.)

@El6YUlRJVNEFutr

Here are the accounts most frequently followed by the accounts in the network. Almost all of the accounts followed by the network are Arabic-language accounts. Most (other than @El6YUlRJVNEFutr) are established accounts with at least some content.

The accounts in this network all follow hundreds of accounts but have few or no followers of their own. Almost have Arabic display names and "KSA" as their profile location. Most of the accounts between 2014 and 2021, when they suddenly woke up and kicked into high gear.

For many of these accounts, their recent reawakening was accompanied by a makeover. At least 9107 had their display names changed sometime between March 2020 (when we captured data on a bunch of older Twitter accounts) and July 2021 - in all cases, to Arabic text.

@justinsuntron

Almost all of this network's content since it woke back up (1996877 of 1997387 tweets, 99.97%) is retweets, mostly of the same content. The network primarily amplifies large Arabic-language accounts, although two of the top three are exceptions: @justinsuntron and @BitTorrent.

This network showed one previous spike of activity back in August 2012, when it posted thousands of tweets about "photos" accompanied by shortened links. The shortened links lead to pages hosted on narod(dot)ru that no longer exist.

@ARTEM_KLYUSHIN

How did we find this network? It bestowed a few hundred retweets each on a series of recent @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN tweets about a tanker fire in Dubai, all of which received substantially more retweets than likes as a result. This is a sign of potential astroturfing, so we dug deeper.

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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jun 6

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...

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.com/p/journalism-i…

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.

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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!

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.