About three years ago, a bunch of accounts with GAN-generated faces moved their companies to Las Vegas, where their companies were nearly destroyed. #NewYearsShenaniGANs

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

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of nine tweets containing the text "About three
The duplicate tweets about moving a company to Las Vegas are from a botnet consisting of 37 accounts created on Sept 28th/29th, 2022. All 37 accounts have GAN-generated face pics, and (with the exception of a few early tweets) all tweet exclusively via automation service IFTTT. table of the 37 accounts in the botnethourly tweet volume by source app bar chart, showing that 99collage of the accounts' profile pics, all GAN-generated fac
GAN-generated face pics (at least, the ones in common usage generated by StyleGAN) have the telltale trait that the major facial features (especially the eyes) are in the same location on every image. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.
The content tweeted by this botnet is repetitive, with tweets being duplicated verbatim across multiple accounts. Most of the tweets appear to be fragments of articles published by Success magazine. table of repeated tweetscollage of repeated tweets and screenshots of the success.co
In addition to the repetitive tweets copied from Success magazine, this network also occasionally tweets links to two websites - strive(dot)co and teamfearless(dot)com. These tweets are infrequent - only 253 of the network's 9165 tweets (2.8%). collage of tweets linking thestrive.co
More on GAN-generated profile pics and their use on Twitter and other platforms here:

Some tips for identifying GAN-generated profile pics:

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More from @conspirator0

Jan 2
Meet @SophiaM98566027 (permanent ID 1602043736195751937), a Twitter account created in December 2022 with a stolen profile photo that claims to be a Democrat and 12-year military veteran (allegedly serving in the "Nation Guard").

cc: @ZellaQuixote screenshots of @SophiaM9856...
Unsurprisingly, @SophiaM98566027's profile pic is not the only plagiarized photo posted by this account. The photographs in the account's "good morning" tweets are stolen from the social media pages of random models, and are therefore unlikely to depict the account operator. screenshot of a photo tweet...screenshot of a photo tweet...
This photographic plagiarism habit isn't limited to images of humans. @SophiaM98566027 has repeatedly tweeted stolen cat and dog pics, often claiming or implying that the photos depict @SophiaM98566027's pets. screenshots of a cat photo ...screenshots of a cat photo ...screenshots of a dog photo ...screenshots of a dog photo ...
Read 7 tweets
Dec 28, 2022
Here's a look at 60 hours' worth of recent growth of one of the largest fake follower networks we've ever seen. Between midnight on December 22nd and noon on December 24th, the network's operators created (at least) 131268 empty Twitter accounts.

cc: @ZellaQuixote histogram of account creation timestable of 30 example accounts
We've been tracking various iterations of this massive fake follower network for months, over which the operators of which have created (and lost) millions of fake Twitter accounts. Some previous threads:


The two accounts most frequently followed by these fake followers are @elonmusk and @Twitter, whom the fake accounts followed ~2 days after being created. These fake accounts comprised 23.4% of @elonmusk's and 69.5% of @Twitter's most recent followers as of Dec 26th at 17:30 PST. Follow order by creation date plots for @elonmusk and @Twitt
Read 6 tweets
Dec 26, 2022
It's Christmas Day, so to mark the occasion here's a thread on an NFT spam network tweeting about a "Penguin Christmas" and tagging a bunch of random accounts.

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of three "Penguin Christmas" tweets from t
This spam network consists of 830 accounts created on November 21st, 2022. Their @-handles are composed of ten random letters: the first either uppercase or lowercase, the next four lowercase, and the last five uppercase. Most of their display names contain the word "penguin". histogram of account creation dates/times, showing that all table of 30 example accounts
Although there are 830 accounts in this network, they only have 23 distinct profile images between them. Each image is used by between 21 and 49 of the accounts in the network. collage of the 23 unique profile images used by the network
Read 6 tweets
Dec 23, 2022
The year 2022 is drawing to a close, and yet another low-effort Twitter spam network is tweeting about Xinjiang. #FridaySpam

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of four identical tweets containing a video about no
This spam network consists of 50 accounts with female names created on April 26th and April 27th, 2022. Thus far, these accounts have posted all of their tweets via "Twitter for Android", and all appear to have been dormant between October 2nd and December 2nd. table of the 50 accounts in the networkdaily tweet volume by source app bar chart, showing that alldaily tweet volume by type bar chart, showing that the netwo
The tweets tweeted by this network are often repeated verbatim by multiple accounts. Their content is a mix of feel-good content about Xinjiang, denial of human rights abuses by China, and tweets about U.S. political issues (abortion, student loans, military aid to Ukraine, etc). table of the network's most frequently repeated tweets
Read 7 tweets
Dec 22, 2022
Over the last 3 years, we've analyzed and posted threads about a variety of similar spam networks associated with an entity known as "Thousand Followers" or "Thousand Bytes". Here's a Substack article covering the entire astroturfy saga.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.substack.com/p/a-thousand-f…
This series of fake follower/account sales operations first came on our radar back in August 2020, when we ran across follower sales website thousandfollowers(dot)com. We found the site's operator(s) on BlackHatWorld, and kept an eye on their posts.
In January 2022, the operators of the now-defunct thousandfollowers(dot)com started advertising a new account sales website, twaccs(dot)com. Both we () and @EJGibney () posted analyses of the site and the accounts it sold.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 18, 2022
What's up with these tweets that got hundreds of retweets and no likes whatsoever? #SundaySpam

cc: @ZellaQuixote screenshots of several recent tweets with hundreds of retwee
Answer: the tweets in question were amplified by a spam network consisting of (at least) 3586 accounts created between October 2013 and December 2022. The accounts have Turkish display names that rarely match their @-handles. histogram of account creation dates, showing creation dates table of example accounts
All of this network's recent tweets are retweets, and all of these retweets were tweeted via Twitter for Android. (Some accounts have older tweets sent with other apps; as we'll see, these accounts were likely hijacked and the old tweets are probably from the original owners.) hourly tweet volume by source app chart, showing that all twhourly tweet volume by source app chart, showing that all tw
Read 5 tweets

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