Data Scientist/Musician/Participant in the General Confusion @trutherbotprop
Resist autocracy and research/counter disinformation. I serve the realm.
40 subscribers
In the last several days, Facebook's algorithm has served me posts of this sort from 18 different accounts that recycle many of the same AI-generated images. Six of these accounts have been renamed at least once. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
For this experiment, four simple chatbots were created:
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. 
"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.
As with the banned @emywinst account, the @kamala_wins47 account farms engagement by reposting other people's videos, accompanied by bogus claims that the videos have been deleted from Twitter. These video posts frequently garner massive view counts.
An X search for "Pierre Poilievre", "Kirkland Lake", and "refreshing" performed on August 4th, 2024 turned up 151 posts from 151 accounts. All are new accounts, with the oldest having been created less than a month ago, on July 7th, 2024. (Some have since been suspended by X.) 
THE GOOD:
First, some background and a couple debunks of the false article, for those unfamiliar with the situation:
There are multiple indicators that @LovewinnLove's "face" is GAN-generated:
The politics enthusiasts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 575 accounts created between May and December 2023 with GAN-generated faces. Many of their handles, such as @Maairiuieinaaa and @eJooeiaAoneueer, contain long strings of vowels. 
This network consists of 24 X accounts. 12 of these accounts were created in the latter half of 2023 and have female avatars, while the other 12 were created in 2013 or earlier and have male avatars. 
As it turns out, @ImJamesMiller wasn't always named @ImJamesMiller. In June, the account was named @/IamJimCaviezel in an apparent attempt to impersonate Sound of Freedom actor Jim Caviezel.
This spam network consists of (at least) 401 accounts, all of which were created (or added to the Bluesky app view) in August 2023. These accounts do not follow each other; rather, each one follows a small number of popular Bluesky accounts. 
More on GAN-generated faces and their use on Twitter here: 
Verified organizations on Twitter can verify affiliated accounts (employees, teams, brand names, etc), which receive blue checkmarks as well as an organization badge (help.twitter.com/en/using-twitt…). The @thisisorange account has thousands of affiliates, mostly cryptocurrency accounts.
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 website promoted by the spam accounts (uu55111 dot com) describes itself as a "financial income platform" and claims to offer various crypto-related financial services. Needless to say, obscure financial websites promoted by spam networks should be approached with distrust. 
This network consists of seven accounts with similar tweet schedules and a focus on Florida that tweet the vast majority of their tweets via TweetDeck: @4_sarasota, @CalendarMad, @CapitalTales, @FreshStarSrq, @PublicGood2050, @TwartVader, and @lakesarasota. 
