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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 13, 2022 • 7 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

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@BlakeHarbinGA

What do 2022 Congressional candidates @BlakeHarbinGA (R), @DavidGiglioCA (R), and @RajiRab2020 (D) have in common? All three have recently been followed by thousands of newly-created accounts with lowercase display names and zero tweets.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

The new followers of the three Congressional candidates are part of a botnet consisting of (at least) 38105 accounts with random-looking names created in December 2021/January 2022. None of the accounts has ever tweeted, though most have liked dozens or hundreds of tweets.

The accounts in this botnet have extremely repetitive biographies, using only 1085 unique biographies across 38105 accounts.

What do these accounts actually do?

@JuanOrlandoH

The accounts in the botnet do two things: like and follow. The accounts whose tweets the bots like are mostly cryptocurrency accounts, although @JuanOrlandoH, the President of Honduras, turns up prominently.

@BlakeHarbinGA

The botnet also mostly follows cryptocurrency accounts. As mentioned earlier, three 2022 US House candidates have followers from this botnet:

@BlakeHarbinGA (GA Republican, 7855 followers)
@DavidGiglioCA (CA Republican, 8563 followers)
@RajiRab2020 (CA Democrat, 10835 followers)

Here's a slideshow of follow order by creation date plots for various accounts that have a lot of followers from the botnet. The mass-created bot followers from the network show up as horizontal streaks (colorfully highlighted).

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1431410532846866435

This botnet shares multiple characteristics (random names, no tweets, lots of likes, repeated biographies) with a couple of botnets we found in fall 2021, and may be a new incarnation of the same operation.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1431410532846866435

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1440436082982621185

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.

A related issue: articles like the "Nearly Half of Biden/Trump's Followers Are Fake" and "Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Bots" pieces base their numbers on closed-source third party tools, which may or may not actually be detecting anything useful.

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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
conspirator0.com/p/how-to-talk-…

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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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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cc: @ZellaQuixote

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Conspirador Norteño

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cc: @ZellaQuixote

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