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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Feb 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

The 2022 #WinterOlympics are underway, and spammy networks such as this group of accounts with anime avatars tweeting about the "pokesperson of Chinese Embassy in the US" are taking an interest in the occasion.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

These tweets were posted by a network consisting of (at least) 152 similarly-named accounts created in batches between September 2021 and January 2022. All tweet (allegedly) via either the Twitter Web App or Twitter for Android, and all have few or no followers or followees.

Many of the tweets posted by this network are duplicated on multiple accounts. The main theme is denial of human rights abuses against Uyghurs, with "feel-good" content about Xinjiang thrown in. The network frequently uses Olympic hashtags (#WinterOlympics, #Beijing2022, etc).

@zlj517

Who do the accounts in this spam network retweet, quote tweet, and reply to? Each other, mostly, although they do also interact with a few large accounts, including official Chinese government accounts @zlj517 and @CGMeifangZhang.

This network also occasionally tags government officials, journalists, and organizations from a variety of countries in its tweets. The tweets containing the tags are mostly random photos from Xinjiang.

The accounts in this network use a mix of cartoon avatars (mostly anime/manga), default profile pics, and photos of actual human beings. The photos of real people are, unsurprisingly, plagiarized from various places on the Internet.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1471691705132851202

Spam networks pushing Xinjiang-related propaganda have been a thing for a while. Some threads:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1471691705132851202

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1449971215729369089

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1431783976142782464

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1391175028708892673

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1372007492276916224

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1352408453143269378

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1333083837337903109

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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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Apr 26

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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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.

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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.

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.

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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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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.