First up, we have @DrAdamAneevit, an antivax account with 38K followers and a GAN-generated face. Although this account's bio states that it is a "pArOdY", plenty of people are eating up its misleading tweets about COVID and vaccines.
As it turns out, @DrAdamAneevit (permanent ID 949263131800424449) wasn't always called @DrAdamAneevit. Wayback machine archives reveal that this account was previously a "news" account named @/ForFactsSake101.
Next up is @RowcliffeAndy (permanent ID 1545105573997252608), an account created in July 2022 with a GAN-generated face. @RowcliffeAndy's greatest achievement thus far is spamming a meme until Dilbert creator @ScottAdamsSays amplified it.
Third on today's list of dodgy GAN-faced Twitter accounts is @ViktorKoval9 (ID 1497503918695530497). This account tweeted an image of a nonexistent tweet from a nonexistent blue-check account. The fake tweet contains a GAN-generated face, falsely represented as a boy in Ukraine.
Last, and possibly least, we have @StevieDougie (ID 324652265), a right-wing Twitter account that disapproves of Marxism and communism and has therefore (allegedly) moved from the United States to Vietnam, a country with a communist government.
How can we tell these four images are GAN-generated? There are a few tells: nonsensical backgrounds, mismatched/missing ears, weird artifacts where the hair meets the skin or background, and identical placement of the major facial features (as seen here:
Note: the four accounts in this thread are presented as distinct examples of accounts that have GAN-generated face pics combined with other suspicious attributes. We found no evidence that the four accounts are related or run by the same entity.
The operator of the @DrAdamAneevit account was apparently not a fan of this thread.
The @RowcliffeAndy account has left a few replies to this thread. The attempt at falsely equating the use of a fake human face with the use of a cartoon avatar that no one would mistake for human has become a somewhat common tactic of bad-faith actors.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
This follower sales website, cryptolikez(dot)com, has an associated Twitter account by the name of @cryptolikez (permanent 1494042375529938946). Almost all of @cryptolikez's 41K followers are accounts created between March and June 2022 that followed @cryptolikez en masse.
The batch-created accounts following @cryptolikez are part of an astroturf botnet consisting of (at least) 243586 accounts created between January and July 2022. All of the tweets posted by this botnet were (allegedly) tweeted via the Twitter Web App.
These accounts are part of a network consisting of (at least) 408 accounts created between February and July 2022 (mostly in July). These accounts all have single-letter display names (usually "Q"), and (allegedly) send all their tweets via Twitter for Android.
The accounts in this network use the same profile pics over and over, with only 7 distinct images (including the default) pic across 408 accounts. We were unable to find the sources of any of the images using TinEye or Google reverse image search.
What do Michigan GOP congressional candidate @Seely4Congress and New Hampshire GOP state senate candidate @LougNH have in common? Both were recently followed by swarms of recently-created accounts with random-looking names. #KeepOnAstroturfin
The recently-created accounts that followed the two GOP candidates en masse are part of an astroturf botnet consisting of (at least) 25762 accounts created in June and July 2022 with display names consisting of random lowercase letters.
Here are follow order by creation date plots for @Seely4Congress and @LougNH. The followers from the botnet show up as horizontal streaks (highlighted in red).
How do we know that @JonasMattheww's profile image is GAN-generated? There are several signs, such as nonsensical clothing that melts into the neck and background.
GAN-generated faces (at least the commonly-available ones) have the telltale trait that the primary facial features (especially eyes) are in the same location on each image. This becomes obvious when multiple GAN-generated faces are blended together.
What do these nine cryptocurrency/NFT accounts have in common? Several things: all were created in 2010, all have been renamed at least once, and all appear to have gained their followers from the same illegitimate sources.
These nine accounts were all created between April and August 2010. A few of the accounts tweeted via a variety of apps back in 2010, but all of them fell silent for over a decade until they woke up in 2022 tweeting about NFT/crypto stuff via the Twitter Web App.
All nine of these recently-awakened crypto accounts were renamed sometime between May 2020 and the present day. (The source for the previous names is a dataset of older account profiles we downloaded in spring 2020, discussed here:
Meet @ItsJustMeRED and @JordanFun2, a pair of MAGA accounts with plagiarized profile photos who celebrated the 4th of July by tweeting additional plagiarized photos.
These accounts are part of a network of eight MAGA accounts that retweet, reply to, quote tweet, and follow each other. Most have stolen profile photos (although @imp1ss3d0ff appears to be a cropped GAN-generated face). As we'll see, they also frequently tweet plagiarized photos.
All of the accounts in this network with the exception of @goldisez profusely post plagiarized photographs of random women, often falsely implying that the image depicts the operator of one of the accounts. Many of these photos are duplicated by multiple accounts in the network.