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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Aug 28, 2021 • 8 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

How did these six seemingly unrelated tweets end up with thousands of likes but few or no retweets? Are the likes coming from a large astroturf botnet created over the last month? (Spoiler: yup.) #FridayAstroturf

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This botnet consists of (at least) 13870 accounts with lowercase display names created between July 29th and August 26th, 2021. None has tweeted as of yet, but all follow dozens or hundreds of accounts and most have liked dozens or hundreds of tweets.

@JuanOrlandoH

The bots in this network do two things: like tweets and follow accounts. The account whose tweets they've liked most frequently is @JuanOrlandoH, the President of Honduras. Many (not all) of the other accounts that received lots of likes from the botnet are cryptocurrency-themed.

@Jh8Uy

Interestingly, two of the accounts whose tweets were frequently liked by the botnet (@Jh8Uy and @bi3followers9) claim to be selling social media services such as followers and likes. It's not unlikely that the botnet is (part of) how these services are provided

@JuanOrlandoH

The bots in this network mostly promotional/commercial accounts. As with the likes, many of the accounts followed have a focus on cryptocurrency/blockchain content, but it's a (mostly) different lineup of accounts. None of the bots follow @JuanOrlandoH, despite liking his tweets.

Here's a slideshow of follow order by creation date scatter plots for several of the accounts followed by the botnet. The bot followers show up as horizontal streaks of thousands of accounts with similar creation dates. (These streaks are how most of the botnet was identified.)

@bi3followers9

Update: it would appear that @bi3followers9 was not a fan of this thread.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1431410908073537540

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1431411003615584257

Typo in this tweet, first sentence should be "The bots in this network mostly follow promotional/commercial accounts."

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1431411003615584257

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Mar 8

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

Alleged author "Scott Jenkins" is allegedly published by publishing company Tigress Publishing, which also publishes two other authors with GAN-generated faces, "Morgan Reid" and "Susan Jeffries". (A fourth author uses a photo of unknown origin.)

As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN-generated faces, the facial feature positioning is extremely consistent between the three alleged author images. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.

Read 5 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Feb 8

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.

The AI-generated images posted by these accounts include the aforementioned sculptures, sad birthdays, soldiers holding up cardboard signs with spelling errors, and farm scenes.

The common element: some sort of emotional appeal to real humans viewing the content.

Read 7 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 24

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

This fake follower network consists of 8070 Bluesky accounts created between Nov 30 and Dec 30, 2024. None has posted, although some have reposted here and there. Almost all of their biographies are in Portuguese, with the exception of a few whose biographies only contain emoji.

The accounts in this fake follower network use a variety of repeated or otherwise formulaic biographies, some of which are repeated dozens or hundred of times. Some of the biographies begin with unnecessary leading commas, and a few consist entirely of punctuation.

Read 8 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 10

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.

Read 6 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Oct 18, 2024

None of these chefs exist, as they're all AI-generated images. This hasn't stopped them from racking up lots of engagement on Facebook by posting AI-generated images of food (and occasional thoughts and prayers), however.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

These "chefs" are part of a network of 18 Facebook pages with names like "Cook Fastly" and "Emily Recipes" that continually post AI-generated images of food. While many of these pages claim to be US-based, they are have admins in Morocco per Facebook's Page Transparency feature.

Between them, these 18 Facebook "chef" pages have posted AI-generated images of food at least 36,000 times in the last five months. Not all of the images are unique; many have been posted repeatedly, sometimes by more than one of the alleged chefs.

Read 7 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Sep 8, 2024

Can simple text generation bots keep sophisticated LLM chatbots like ChatGPT engaged indefinitely? The answer is yes, which has some potentially interesting implications for distinguishing between conversational chatbots and humans.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.substack.com/p/baiting-the-…

For this experiment, four simple chatbots were created:

• a bot that asks the same question over and over
• a bot that replies with random fragments of a work of fiction
• a bot that asks randomly generated questions
• a bot that repeatedly asks "what do you mean by <X>?"

The output of these chatbots was used as input to an LLM chatbot based on the 8B version of the Llama 3.1 model. Three of the four bots were successful at engaging the LLM chatbot in a 1000-message exchange; the only one that failed was the repetitive question bot.