It's February, and a group of accounts with GAN-generated profile pics are tweeting identical "Merry Christmas" tweets promoting some kind of NFT giveaway.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to produce fake faces)
These accounts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 6105 accounts created in February 2022, mostly in large batches. All have GAN-generated profile pics. The same names are reused across accounts - the 6105 accounts only have 25 unique first names between them.
The GAN-generated face pics produced by tools like thispersondoesnotexist.com have the telltale trait that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same position on every image. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.
Despite the fact that one can generate as many unique GAN faces as one desired, this spam network frequently uses the same fake face on multiple accounts.
The accounts in this network have followed several accounts en masse, mostly metaverse and/or NFT-themed. Former Ukraine President Petro @Poroshenko, current US President Joe Biden (@POTUS), and Tesla founder @elonmusk also turn up.
The accounts in this network (allegedly) tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App. Their tweet content is a mix of original tweets, retweets, and replies.
The "original" content tweeted by this network consists of two tweets that have been repeated verbatim by hundreds of the accounts. (One of these tweets is the February "Merry Christmas" NFT giveaway tweet mentioned earlier.)
The network's retweets are also repetitive - almost all retweets are of the same four NFT/crypto tweets. The network's replies are all brief threads containing the phrase "Fishing Free NFTs" and tagging @Fishing_Crypto and large numbers of seemingly random accounts.
More information on GAN-generated profile pics in this compliation of threads:

Some additional info on signs that a face pic may be GAN-generated here:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Conspirador Norteño

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @conspirator0

Feb 4
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
Read 7 tweets
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
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
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
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
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

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

:(