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Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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Jan 14 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
It's #Caturday, so here's a look at a smallish botnet that tweeted identical tweets about bobcats playing on a Texas golf course.

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of 15 identical tweets consisting of the text "
This botnet consists of 15 accounts created in 2018 that mostly abstained from tweeting until mid-2022. Most of their recent tweets were sent via the Twitter Web App, with the exception of 183 retweets that were somehow sent via "Twitter Web Client" (the pre-2019 Twitter web UI). table of the 15 accounts in the botnetweekly volume by tweet source chart, showing that almost all
The content posted by this network is extremely repetitive, with 124 distinct tweets that were tweeted at least once by all 15 accounts. None of the content is original; the repeated tweets are all plagiarized Twitter headlines. table of repeated tweetsexample screenshots of headlines the repeated tweets were pl
This botnet retweets a variety of accounts with names like @crickett20live, @nflgamehd, and @grammy22livee that unauthorized livestreams of sporting events and awards ceremonies. It's not unlikely that promoting these streams is the primary goal of the network. table of accounts retweeted by the botnet
H/T @pfffftfacts for the lead.

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 11
It's 2023, and accounts with GAN-generated faces continue to receive "verification" checkmarks from Twitter Blue here and there. #BlueCheckShenaniGANs

(These accounts were found by searching for common English words in combination with "filter:blue_verified.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote collage of the profiles of six Twitter Blue verified account
Unmodified GAN-generated faces (at least, those in widespread use) have the telltale trait that the primary facial features (particularly the eyes) are rendered in the same location on each image. This becomes obvious when multiple "faces" are blended together.
These "faces" contain additional anomalies that indicate that they are synthetically generated, such as the surreal backgrounds in @Doctor_Iver's and @jonidanna's images and @jonidanna's mismatched earrings. @mikerson_mike's "face" was obtained from generated.photos. collage of the GAN-generated faces used by the accountsscreenshot of @mikerson_mike's profile and screenshot of @mi
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 6
Over the last 24 hours or so, a bunch of popular accounts that tweet about US politics got followed by a swarm of newly created accounts with default profile pics. What's up with that?

cc: @ZellaQuixote
These followers are part of a fake follower network consisting of (at least) 6279 accounts created between January 4th and January 6th, 2023. All have zero tweets and default profile images.
The accounts in this fake follower network all have display names consisting of a first name and last name, sometimes accompanied by one of the following prefixes or suffixes:

DDS
DVM
Dr.
Jr.
MD
Miss
Mr.
Mrs.
Ms.
PhD
Sr.
I
II
III
IV
V
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 5
The ongoing saga of a persistent fake persona: If at first you don't succeed, create a new inauthentic account with minor tweaks.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-…
This post covers a series of fake accounts that all appear to be attempts to create the same persona. We ran across the first account (@cheecierom) in July 2020, when it was attempting to spread a rumor about Bill Barr visiting Ghislaine Maxwell in jail:
The second incarnation of this persona - @/romanochee69 (later renamed to @Mollyjucee091) turned up later in 2020, when a photo of a locked mailbox it tweeted went viral:
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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 @SophiaM98566027 profile and tweets along wit
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 tweeted by @SophiaM98566027 and a revescreenshot of a photo tweeted by @SophiaM98566027 and a reve
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 tweeted by @SophiaM98566027 and ascreenshots of a cat photo tweeted by @SophiaM98566027 and ascreenshots of a dog photo tweeted by @SophiaM98566027 and ascreenshots of a dog photo tweeted by @SophiaM98566027 and a
Read 8 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
Jan 1
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.
Read 6 tweets
Conspirador Norteño Profile picture
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

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