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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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Feb 4 • 7 tweets • 6 min read
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 Image
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. ImageImageImage
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). ImageImage
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. ImageImage
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. ImageImage
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. ImageImage
Spam networks pushing Xinjiang-related propaganda have been a thing for a while. Some threads:






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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 30
For a change of pace, I'm doing a bit of a YouTube experiment. I'm going to choose six songs of varied genre on a new YouTube account, and then just listen to whatever it creates as the "My Mix" playlist. #FruitOfTheAlgorithm

Song 1:
(I will be skipping repeated tracks)
Song 2:
Read 25 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 29
Meet @Gabby_ucm, a Twitter account with a GAN-generated profile pic that has gained over 20 thousand followers since being created in September 2021.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to produce fake faces) #FridayShenaniGANs Image
Unmodified GAN-generated face pics have the telltale trait that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same position on every image, and @Gabby_ucm's profile pic is no exception. There are also anomalies in the teeth, clothing, and hair of @Gabby_ucm's pic.
More on GAN-generated images and their use on Twitter in this set of threads: )
Read 12 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 13
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?
Read 7 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 12
In one of the sillier developments in recent history, the adherents of this flawed "vetting guide" are now issuing "alerts" about my account because (gasp!) a small number of the 41K accounts following me look suspicious. Image
Since I'm now being targeted, I'm going to be blunt. The principal author of this "vetting guide", @EnseySherwood, blatantly makes shit about about bot detection, such as this false claim that servers have a setting that Twitter could use to eliminate all bots in 10 minutes. Image
If you have been relying on this person or the "vetting guide" for advice on bots and suspicious accounts, you've been fooled, and you should probably also give some thought as to why certain "vetting experts" constantly lock their accounts and refuse to engage with critics.
Read 4 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 6
It's possible to automate this technique and download most or all of an account's tweets archived on Wayback Machine/Internet Archive. Here's how to write a basic Python program to download the tweets and store them as a CSV file.

(Pastebin link to source code at end of thread)
Step 1: read the list of all the Wayback Machine archives of the account in question. The URL used is the same call the Wayback Machine website uses, but the maximum number of results has been bumped to 1 million.(Wayback Machine defaults to 10K max results.)
Step 2: filter the results to archives of individual tweets or replies (throwing away things like archives of someone's profile etc). Tweets from before Twitter switched to using Snowflake IDs (November 2011 blog.twitter.com/engineering/en…) are also discarded.
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 3
The hashtag #Hero trended in the USA yesterday (January 2nd, 2022) with a truly massive volume of tweets. In an interesting twist, the vast majority of the tweets are in Farsi despite "hero" being an English word.

cc: @ZellaQuixote Image
The #Hero trend appears to be the result of a preplanned tweetstorm commemorating General Qasim Soleimani on the second anniversary of his assassination in January 2020. Tweet activity (mostly in Farsi) using this hashtag has been building since mid-December 2021. ImageImage
Over 1.6 million tweets containing #Hero were tweeted by 50872 accounts on Jan 2, 2022. Very little of the traffic appears to be automated. An exception is @Ra_Shojaei, which tweets pro-Soleimani tweets 24/7 via a custom app called "TwèétDeck" (not to be confused with TweetDeck). ImageImageImage
Read 5 tweets

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