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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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8 Aug, 9 tweets, 7 min read
The repetitive biographies that frequently mention beavers may be silly, but the fact that you can pay to have thousands of these accounts retweet, reply to, or follow you is even sillier. #SundaySpam #BeaverAstroturf

cc: @ZellaQuixote
These accounts are part of an astroturf network consisting of (at least) 11599 accounts created (mostly) in 2021. Each account has a two word biography composed of a capitalized adjective followed by a lowercase noun, drawn from a pool of 36 adjectives and 36 nouns.
The accounts in this network follow a variety of accounts, with cryptocurrency as a recurring theme. The account followed by the largest swath of the network is @PRm4u_official, the "official" account of prm4u(dot)com, a website selling SMM ("social media management") services.
prm4u(dot)com (the site promoted by @PRm4u_official) sells Twitter retweets, replies, likes and followers, and offers parallel services for several other social media platforms. Interestingly, you can choose the device type for several of the services (iOS retweets, for example).
The prm4u(dot)com site was registered quite recently - July 18, 2021. As always, we recommend taking precautions when checking out shady websites (we visited this one through Tor), and buying social media followers and engagement from mysterious third parties is generally unwise.
Here's a slideshow of follow order by creation date plots for the 25 accounts most frequently followed by the network, with the followers from the network highlighted in red. (Some of the plots have anomalies indicating the potential presence of other bulk follow networks).
(more on follow order by creation date plots, including python source code)
The majority of this network's content was posted in 2021, mostly via the Twitter Web App but with some tweets from smartphone apps as well. (Unsurprising, given that customers can select the device type for the retweets etc that they buy.) Most of the content is retweets.
Who/what does this network amplify? Lots of variety; cryptocurrency is a recurring theme, with @justinsuntron as the most frequently amplified account. This network has also retweeted hashtag-laden tweets from a few tiny accounts (examples: @Richard28680795 and @JosephG84349587).

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
8 Aug
Cryptocurrency astroturf networks have become increasingly prevalent on Twitter over the last year or so. Here are a bunch of threads on networks varying in size from a few dozen to tens of thousands of accounts. (Most of these networks have been suspended.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote
From March 2020: 58 automated "crypto wizard" and "forex queen" accounts. These accounts mostly linked crypto-related Telegram channels.
95 account network from August 2020, amplifying various cryptocurrency content as well as Twitter automation aficionado @ARTEM_KLYUSHIN.
Read 19 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
6 Aug
This tweet from @17LiveJP received more than ten times as many retweets as likes (20.5K vs 1.5K), a sign of potential astroturfing. Also noteworthy: the tweet was disproportionately retweeted by accounts with default pics created within the last week.

cc: @ZellaQuixote ImageImage
These accounts are part of a retweet network consisting of (at least) 2892 accounts with default profile pics created between July 28th and August 6th 2021. Many of the accounts have an email address in their display names; the remainder have short Japanese display names. ImageImage
The accounts in this network (allegedly) post all of their tweets via the Twitter Web App. All content to date is retweets. None of the accounts in the network has ever liked a tweet, and none follows more than 9 accounts (most follow the same 3; more on that later). ImageImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
3 Aug
None of these people exist (the faces are all GAN-generated), but that's not stopping them from advertising random musicians to their new followers.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake faces.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote Image
The accounts depicted in the previous tweet are part of a network of (at least) 1393 accounts, most of which were created in large batches in June/July 2021. All have GAN-generated faces as their profile pics (all female) and female display names. ImageImageImageImage
Unmodified GAN-generated face pics (so far) have the telltale trait that the primary facial features (particularly the eyes) are rendered in the same location on each image. This property becomes quite visible when the images are blended together.
Read 11 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
1 Aug
When you're a spammer with something to share, you share it simultaneously on ten Twitter accounts that were created on the same day and tag the same people in every tweet. It's what you do. #Spamtastic #Propagandalicious

cc: @ZellaQuixote
These accounts are part of a network of (at least) 42 accounts created over a span of eight hours on July 10th, 2021. All have female names and profile pics, zero friends/followers, and have thus far tweeted exclusively via Twitter for Android.
The accounts in this network do three things: post repetitive tweets, retweet tweets, and like tweets. The repetitive tweets all contain links to articles/videos (mostly Xinjiang-related content from Chinese media/government sites), and most of them tag exactly two accounts.
Read 5 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
31 Jul
If you've got $500 laying around that you can't wait to spend on something totally pointless, you could always snag @diegorm222 (ID 3314630561) or @ThatDubstepDJ (ID 398479839). It doesn't matter which one you buy since they basically have the same followers.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
A third account, @Cryptocurrentcc, shares nearly all of its followers with @diegorm222 and @ThatDubstepDJ. A total of 79647 accounts follow all three, comprising at least 96.7% of each main account's followers. Very few are new accounts, which is also unusual.
.@diegorm222, @ThatDubstepDJ, and @Cryptocurrentcc are all older accounts that have been mostly purged of tweets prior to July 2021. Recent content is all cryptocurrency-themed. Despite their age, these three accounts gained almost all of their 80K-ish followers in summer 2021.
Read 7 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
26 Jul
It's a Monday afternoon, which is the perfect time to look at a pornbot network with a penchant attaching random emoji to its repetitive tweets. Also, it spam-followed a rather odd lineup of accounts. #MondayMotivation #Spamtastic

cc: @ZellaQuixote Image
This network consists of (at least) 27745 Japanese-language accounts, created in batches between June 1st and July 25th, 2010. All tweets posted by these accounts so far were (allegedly) sent via the Twitter Web App. None has ever liked a tweet. ImageImageImageImage
The accounts in this network are extremely repetitive, with the same tweets frequently duplicated verbatim (other than emoji) by dozens of accounts. The accounts' biographies generally include an invitation to chat with unknown parties on the LINE messaging app. ImageImage
Read 6 tweets

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