Thread by @conspirator0

If your interests include OnlyFans, pro-China propaganda, and social media accounts with artificially generated faces, then this is the botnet for you. (There's also cryptocurrency spam involved because of course there is.) #FridayShenaniGANs

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This network consists of (at least) 1627 Twitter accounts created between April 30th and May 20th, 2023. All of them follow at least two of the following accounts: @AoTJewels, @BlackYellow, @Fenerbahce, and @elonmusk ,and tweet via Twitter for Android or the Twitter Web App.

The 1627 accounts in this network all use GAN-generated faces as their profile pics. All of these images have neutral backgrounds and are 255x255 pixels (Twitter default is 400x400).

(GAN = "generative adversial network", the technology used to generate the "face" images)

Unmodified StyleGAN-generated face images have the interesting property that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same position on every image. This becomes obvious when one blends multiple images together (such as the 1627 "faces" used by the network).

The accounts in this network tweet in multiple languages, with English being the most frequent (66.1% of tweets), followed by Chinese (16.1%). Slightly over half of their content is retweets (56.8%); the content retweeted is mostly NFT/cryptocurrency-related.

The network's content is repetitive, with large numbers of accounts tweeting identical or similar tweets, but varied in theme. The most common types of English tweets are similarly-worded porn tweets and famous quotes.

The network's repetitive Chinese tweets, on the other hand, are often political (although there's some porn in there too). Topics include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Guo Wengui, Steve Bannon, and Yan Li-Meng, all of whom the network's tweets portray as anti-China.

Several of the accounts in this network also recently tweeted propaganda about Moldova. More info in this thread and blog post (H/T @z3dster).
medium.com/@mitchchaiet/m…

https://twitter.com/z3dster/status/1664620502109888518

More on StyleGAN-generated faces and their use on social media here:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1322704400226394112

Tips on detecting StyleGAN-generated faces (note that some of these do not apply to output from text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney):

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1457051817699860483