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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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May 4 • 8 tweets • 7 min read
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 collage of three identical tweets containing the text "
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. table of the 60 accounts spamming the #accelerationism hashtTable of the 20 most frequently repeated tweets, most of whitweet volume by source bar chart, showing that the 60 accoun
We've seen a group of accounts spamming about "accelerationism" before: . 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? collage of #accelerationism tweets that received dozens of r
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. screenshot of a list of accounts with Arabic profiles that rscreenshots of the profiles of three of the accounts that rescreenshots of @smm_mohd's profile and pinned tweet with Engscreenshot of the website in question, smm-mohd(dot)com, sho
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. histogram of account creation dates for the 4452 accounts intable of example accounts from the astroturf network, most o
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. tweet volume by tweet type chart for the astroturf network, tweet volume by source app chart for the astroturf network, tweet volume by source app chart for the astroturf network,
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. table of the accounts most frequently retweeted by the astro

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Apr 29
Do you want to make the onions cry one day? There's a botnet for that, and it's following a bunch of cryptocurrency accounts.

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of account profiles for @ErnestoGilmore1, @LiamHo18,
This botnet consists of 52770 accounts created between March 29th and April 27th, 2022. None has ever tweeted or liked a tweet, and most have no followers of their own. Biographies are heavily repeated - the 52770 accounts have only 104 unique biographies. bar chart of account creation dates, ranging from March 29thtable of 30 example accounts, showing 0 tweets/0 likestable of account biographies (104 unique biographies)
This network also reuses profile images; the 52770 accounts have only 611 unique profile pics, many of them repeated across hundreds of accounts. 400 of the images are GAN-generated faces. (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com). grid of 400 GAN-generated faces used as profile pics by this
Read 10 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Apr 28
As many people have noticed, accounts popular on the right experienced accelerated follower growth after Monday's announcement of Elon Musk's Twitter purchase. Here's a comparison of recent followers of 12 prominent accounts before and after the announcement.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
First, the followers are (probably) not bots. We found no evidence of widespread automation (or for that matter, astroturfing behaviors like coordinated retweeting that frequently get mistaken for bots). Twitter reached a similar conclusion:
When did the follower growth kick into high gear? Most (but not all) of the 12 influencers we looked at started gaining followers at a much faster rate starting around noon Pacific time on the day the Musk/Twitter deal was announced (April 25th, 2022).
Read 10 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Apr 25
This tweet is dishonest based on the first two words alone, never mind the rest of it. The vast, vast majority of people concerned about possible consequences of an Elon Musk Twitter purchase are ordinary users and not "corporate journalists" by any stretch of the imagination.
Another awful take from the contrarian clickbait club: this guy is proposing that Elon Musk force Twitter to place fraudulent labels on accounts.
The nonsense takes from people who want Musk to buy Twitter keep on rolling. Neither firing "basically every Twitter employee" nor addressing imaginary concerns like "censorship algorithms that cause followers to inadvertently be dropped" would make Twitter in any way better.
Read 4 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Apr 22
None of these people exist, but that hasn't stopped them from spamming a variety of articles (mostly about cryptocurrency/NFT topics) onto Twitter using social media automation service Socialchief. #FridayShenaniGANs

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of duplicate tweets...
These accounts are part of a network of 8 accounts created over the span of roughly 5 minutes on January 5th, 2022. All 8 use GAN-generated faces as profile pics.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technology used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to produce synthetic faces) table showing that all 8 ac...
The major facial features (particularly the eyes) on unmodified GAN-generated face pics (so far) are always in the same position on the image, regardless of the angle of the face. This becomes obvious when one blends the images together.
Read 7 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Apr 18
What do these six viral tweets have in common? They were all tweeted by accounts that are presently up for sale on a dodgy website called accs-market(dot)com. (Buying used social media accounts from random websites is, needless to say, unwise.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote Collage of viral tweets from @Locati0ns, @HumanBeingBro, @GeCollage of sales listings on accs-market(dot)com for @Locati
These six accounts (along with four others, for a total of ten) are all being sold by the same accs-market(dot)com user (Thekingdon), for prices ranging from $300 to $9,000 ($23,100 total). The user in question has apparently already sold one account, for $5,000. screenshot of accs-market(dot)com, showing that user Theking
The ten for-sale accounts were created between 2020 and 2022. All have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, but follow almost no accounts themselves. Seven of the group of ten for-sale accounts retweet other accounts in the group. collage of the profiles of the ten for-sale Twitter accountsgraph of retweets showing that several of the accounts retwe
Read 7 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Apr 15
Twitter is taking steps to thwart a potential hostile takeover by Elon Musk, and right-wing propagandist Jack Posobiec is expressing his displeasure by retweeting a two-month old account with 26 followers and a GAN-generated face pic because of course he is. #AltWankers Image
GAN-generated face pics (such as the profile pic used by @JamesClayborn5, the account amplified by Jack Posobiec) have the fingerprint that the main facial features are in the same position on each image. This becomes obvious when one blends multiple GAN faces together.
Apparently in addition to the GAN-generated face, the @JamesClayborn5 account also has used at least one stolen photo. Impersonation is, of course, a violation of Twitter rules.
Read 4 tweets

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