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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Oct 3, 2022 • 10 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X

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@nftsmmpanel

Meet @nftsmmpanel, a Twitter account created in August 2022 that sells likes, followers, and retweets via a shady website. Can we find some of its merchandise? (Spoiler: yup) #SundayAstroturf

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@nftsmmpanel

Sohsh(dot)com, the website promoted by @nftsmmpanel, offers a variety of services (followers, likes, etc) on a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter, Telegram and Instagram. It also offers an API (applications programming interface) to automate purchases.

@nftsmmpanel

Unsurprisingly, @nftsmmpanel appears to have gotten high on its own supply. Almost all of its followers are accounts created in September 2022 with zero tweets and zero likes, presumably examples of the followers sold on its website.

@nftsmmpanel

By recursively exploring the followers of the accounts followed by the mass-created accounts following @nftsmmpanel, we found 742322 accounts created between September 4th and October 2nd, 2022 that appear to be part of this fake follower network.

@HardeepSPuri

Who does this fake follower network follow? Mostly cryptocurrency/NFT-themed accounts, although other types of promotional accounts turn up too, as well as BJP politician @HardeepSPuri. Almost all of the accounts in the network also follow @Twitter and @elonmusk.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1408589182944124934

Here are follow order by creation date plots for some of the accounts that have followers from this fake follower network. The mass-created followers from the network show up as horizontal streaks.

(More on follow order by creation date plots here:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1408589182944124934

)

@flacc4congress

One of the more interesting accounts followed by this network is @flacc4congress. At one point it was the verified account of former Virginia congressional candidate Anthony Flaccavento, but it has been recently transformed into an NFT account.

web.archive.org/web/2022032007…

Here's a Pastebin link with the account IDs of 1000 randomly selected accounts from the network, in case anyone wants to take a look. (Both Twitter developer policy and Pastebin length limits prevent sharing the full list.)
pastebin.com/XEiHP1Gy

@nftsmmpanel

Finally, a big thank you to @nftsmmpanel for helpfully replying to a previous thread with a tweet advertising its services and thereby putting this fake follower network on the proverbial radar.

@nftsmmpanel

Update: the @nftsmmpanel account has been suspended, and the @flacc4congress account has reacted to this thread with a block.

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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.

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.

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The common element: some sort of emotional appeal to real humans viewing the content.

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Conspirador Norteño

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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

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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.

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Conspirador Norteño

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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.

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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
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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.