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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Update: the @nftsmmpanel account has been suspended, and the @flacc4congress account has reacted to this thread with a block.
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Meet @SpartacusJustic, @Lakovos_Justice, and @ClarkOlsin, a trio of accounts with superheroesque profile pics and a penchant for tweeting conspiracy theories about vaccines (mostly, but not exclusively COVID vaccines).
One of the three accounts (@SpartacusJustic) has repeatedly gotten thousands of retweets on tweets containing various bogus claims about COVID vaccines causing mass death/illness and an alleged secret plot by Bill Gates to depopulate the planet.
The other two accounts (@ClarkOlsin and @Lakovos_Justice) post similar content, but have been silent since early June and have few followers. Some of @ClarkOlsin's videos have nevertheless racked up massive view counts due to being embedded in @SpartacusJustic's viral tweets.
How can we tell that @proogb's face is GAN-generated? There are a few tells, most obviously the flesh-colored patches on the glasses where the blue background should be.
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com and similar tools)
Unmodified GAN-generated faces (at least, so far) have the telltale trait that the major facial features (especially eyes) are in the same location on every image. This becomes evident when one blends multiple GAN-generated faces together.
Meet @nftver (permanent ID 1472241100953899011), an NFT account with "DM for promo" in its biography and one of the least authentic-looking follower growth patterns in recorded history.
Almost all of @nftver's followers are part of an astroturf network consisting of 28580 accounts. These accounts all tweet via Twitter for Android; some also tweet via the Twitter Web App. Although the bulk follow behavior is new, the accounts were created over several years.
The accounts in this network follow the accounts they follow in blocks of thousands of accounts created on specific dates within specific date ranges. This results in the blocky/streaky artifacts seen in the follow order by creation date plots.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently released a report on human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (ohchr.org/sites/default/…). A spammy Twitter network is attacking the report with repetitive cartoons and hashtags.
This network consists of 48 similarly-named accounts created between June and September 2022. All have few or no followers, and all thus far have tweeted exclusively via the Twitter Web App, with most of their tweet activity occurring over the last five days.
Most of this network's tweets contain images (612 of 900 tweets, 68%). The tweets that lack images are mostly replies, usually criticism of the United Nations Xinjiang human rights report directed to official UN accounts.
Here's a look at two oddly similar accounts: @EroticExplorerR (permanent ID 409446320) and @ChrisHan0327 (ID 1447828731846807553). Both mostly tweet images, and both appear to have gained a bunch of their followers from the same illicit follower sales website.
The images tweeted by @EroticExplorerR and @ChrisHan0327 are a mix of photographs, drawings, paintings, and posters from a variety of sources (frequently uncredited). All recent tweets from both accounts were tweeted via the Twitter Web App.
Both @EroticExplorerR and @ChrisHan0327 have thousands of followers from Round Year Fun. Round Year Fun is a set of Twitter "games" ("My Twitter Family" etc) that surreptitiously cause your account to follow the customers of follower sales website realactivefollowers(dot)com.
One fingerprint of unmodified GAN-generated faces (at least, those made with widely-available tools) is that the major facial features (especially eyes) are in the same location on every image. This becomes obvious when one blends multiple GAN-generated faces together.
There are other signs that @prof_freedom's profile image is not a real photograph of a person's face. The most obvious is the unrealistic teeth; there are also some strange things going on where the hair meets the background.