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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
@conspirator0
Oct 3, 2022 • 10 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
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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 screenshot of @nftsmmpanel's profilecollage of @nftsmmpanel's tweets advertising likes, follower
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. screenshot of sohsh(dot)com website featuring an option for list of services offered by sohsh(dot)com
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. follow order by creation date plot for @nftsmmpanel's follow
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. histogram of creation dates for the account in the network, table of 30 example accounts from the network
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. table of the 20 accounts most frequently followed by the net
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: ) collage of follow order by creation date plots for various a
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… current screenshot of @flacc4congress's profile, showing thaarchive from March 2022 of @flacc4congress's profile, showinfollow order by creation date plate for @flacc4congress's fo
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
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. reply from @nftsmmpanel to a previous research thread
Update: the @nftsmmpanel account has been suspended, and the @flacc4congress account has reacted to this thread with a block.

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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 screenshots of 12 Bluesky accounts with the biography "Praticante de esportes radicais"
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. hourly creation volume chart for the 8070 accounts in the spam network
table of 30 example spam accounts
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. table of biographies most frequently used by the network
screenshots of six accounts with malformed biographies
Read 8 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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 Screenshots of the profiles of 12 fake LA Dodger employee Facebook accounts
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. collage of 48 GAN-generated faces used as profile images by the fake accounts
collage of 32 identical photos used as profile images by the fake accounts
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 Profile picture
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 collage of 11 AI-generated images of chefs, presently being used as the avatars of Facebook accounts
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. collage of the profiles of 18 Facebook "chef" pages that post AI-generated images of food
screenshots of Facebook page transparency info showing that the pages are run from Morocco
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. examples of AI-generated food images posted by the Facebook spam pages
examples of AI-generated food images posted by more than one Facebook spam page
Read 7 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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-…
screenshot of Substack post
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.


screenshots of portions of the conversation between the repetitive cheeseburger bot and the LLM bot
screenshots of portions of the conversation between the Star Trek bot and the LLM bot
screenshots of portions of the conversation between the random question bot and the LLM bot
screenshots of portions of the conversation between the "what do you mean" bot and the LLM bot
Read 5 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Sep 3, 2024
The spammers behind the "Barndominium Gallery" Facebook page have branched out into AI-generated video and started a YouTube channel with the catchy name "AY CUSTOM HOME". The results are just about as craptastic as you'd expect.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
screenshot of the AY CUSTOM HOME Youtube channel
In this synthetically generated aerial video of a (nonexistent) barndominium under construction, the geometry of the roof changes, a blue building appears, and a tree vanishes, all in the course of just three seconds. still images from two different points in an AY CUSTOM HOME YouTube video, showing multiple impossible changes over the course of a few seconds
This AI-generated barndominium features a long AI-generated porch with some chairs on it. Exactly how many chairs there are depends on what angle you look at it from, however, as the chair on the left splits into three chairs as the camera pans. still images from two different points in an AY CUSTOM HOME YouTube video, showing multiple impossible changes over the course of a few seconds
Read 4 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Aug 28, 2024
Some observations regarding @Botted_Likes (permanent ID 1459592225952649221)...

First, "viral posts which don't result in follower growth and have very little engagement in the reply section" is not a useful heuristic for detecting botted likes. Why not?

cc: @ZellaQuixote screenshot of @Botted_Likes's profile with the text "THIS IS NOT AN EFFECTIVE METHOD OF DETECTING POSTS WITH BOTTED LIKES" overlaid in Comic Sans
"Viral posts that do not result in follower growth" is not a valid test for botting, because posts from large accounts often go viral among the large account's existing followers but do not reach other audiences, resulting in high like/repost counts but little/no follower growth.
"Very little engagement in the reply section" doesn't work for multiple reasons (some topics spur debate and some don't, some people restrict replies, etc)

Hilariously, @Botted_Likes seems to be ignoring their own criteria, as many of the posts they feature have tons of replies. screenshots of six @Botted_Likes posts featuring screenshots of posts that allegedly have botted likes
Read 5 tweets

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