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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

May 4, 2022 • 8 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

What's up with these three identical tweets about accelerationism and "the decline of the United States", and how did they each end up getting dozens of retweets but zero likes? #Astroturfing

cc: @ZellaQuixote

The tweets in question are from a spam network consisting of 60 accounts that post repetitive tweets containing the hashtag #accelerationism in both English and Chinese. All but two of these accounts were created in 2021 or 2022, and all tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1450970919694966793

We've seen a group of accounts spamming about "accelerationism" before:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1450970919694966793

. Five of the accounts mentioned in the previous thread are also part of the current group: @Heather65895763, @KarlaDeng3, @KattieWhalen8, @LyndsayLagerst1, and @Tatiana74606219.

The spammy tweets are a mix of political tweets containing the #accelerationism hashtag and tweets about the game "Need For Speed". 145 of these tweets received dozens of retweets but zero likes. What's going on?

@smm_mohd

Things get more interesting when we look at the accounts that retweeted the spammy tweets. They mostly have Arabic profiles, and many of them retweet an account called @smm_mohd, which is associated with a dodgy website that sells fake social media interactions, smm-mohd(dot)com.

By exploring the retweets of the #accelerationism spam tweet that received dozens of retweets but no likes, we found 4452 part of the astroturf network of Twitter accounts used by ssm-mohd(dot)com to bestow bogus followers and retweets on its customers. Most have Arabic profiles.

Although some of the accounts in this astroturf network have been around for a long time, they were relatively inactive prior to mid-2021. Almost all of their recent tweets are retweets, and almost all were retweeted (allegedly) via the Twitter Web App.

@Promotesocialm1

Most of the content retweeted by the network is cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFT-related (although one of the accounts amplified (@Promotesocialm1) is yet another seller of shady social media services.

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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.