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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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Aug 6 • 7 tweets • 6 min read
Groups of spammy Twitter accounts downplaying human rights abuses in Xinjiang have been a recurring thing for the last couple years. Here's a look at a network of recently-created accounts spamming the #UyghurGenocide hashtag with content unrelated to genocide.

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of six tweets with identical text ("Let‘s enj
This network consists of 48 accounts created in early July 2022, mostly on July 5th. All have names consisting of a first name and a 3-5 digit number (usually at the end but occasionally in the middle), and all tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App. table of 48 Twitter accounts with names consisting of a firsdaily tweet volume by source app graph, showing that the 48
Almost all of this network's content (229 of 238 tweets, 96.2%) is repetitive "feel-good" tweets about Xinjiang (pretty pictures etc) that contain the hashtag #UyghurGenocide but are otherwise unrelated to genocide. Most of these tweets also contain the hashtag #Xinjiang. table of the most frequently repeated tweets from the networ
Since becoming active in mid-July, this network of 48 accounts has generated 11.3% of all tweets containing the #UyghurGenocide, with almost none of the tweets from the network actually being related to the Uyghur genocide. daily bar chart for tweets containing #UyghurGenocide from J
This suggests a possible purpose for this group of accounts: flooding the #UyghurGenocide hashtag with irrelevant content, and thereby making relevant tweets about the topic less frequent in search results.
Previous threads on Uyghur genocide denial/Xinjiang spam:








Here's a paste of the permanent IDs of the 48 accounts in this network, for those who may be interested:
pastebin.com/AX8GWd3a

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 31
When you're making a bunch of spammy accounts, you sometimes repeat generic biographies like "Type in your bio section & put the words that can aptly reflect your business" over and over. It's what you do.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
These accounts are part of an astroturf network consisting of 1666 accounts created in batches from July 2021 to April 2022. Most have Turkish display names, and all of them post all of their tweets via Twitter for Android.

(Some of the accounts do have unique biographies.)
The accounts in this network have posted no original content whatsoever; all of their tweets to date are retweets. They most retweet cryptocurrency/NFT content, with occasional exceptions.
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 24
It's a great day for a quick look at a variety of suspicious Twitter accounts with GAN-generated faces. #SundayShenaniGANs

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technology used by thispersondoesnotexist.com and similar sites to produce fake faces)

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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.

(archive: )
Read 11 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 24
Oh look, it's yet another dodgy website selling fake followers and likes for a variety of social media platforms. #ThingsThatAreNotWorthPayingFor

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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.
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 19
Meet @Q72722580, @Q80196627, @Q35097420, @Q42834960, @Q10736330, @Q50394012, @Q08199619, and @Q07569617, a group of similarly-named Twitter accounts with duplicated profile pics and a variety of alleged jobs.

cc: @ZellaQuixote Image
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. ImageImageImage
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. Image
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 14
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

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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).
Read 8 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jul 8
Meet @JonasMattheww (permanent ID 2494218428) an account with a GAN-generated face spamming #ImpeachBiden tweets (one of which got over 500 RTs).

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to generate fake faces)

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of 11 tweets containing #ImpeachBiden posted by @Jon
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. screenshot of @JonasMattheww's profilecloseup of @JonasMattheww's profile image, a GAN-generated &
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.
Read 8 tweets

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