Notices by Conspirador Norteño (conspirator0@newsie.social)

It's a great day to read about a cryptocurrency spam network that regularly attempts to make obscure and ridiculous cryptocurrency tokens trend on X (formerly Twitter).

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/the-cryptocurrency-spam-treadmill

It's September 2024, and a swarm of spammy X accounts is spamming people's replies with oddly repetitive attacks on Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/these-kamala-harris-critics-do-not

It's a great day to read about the use of low effort fake X/Twitter accounts by white supremacist/U-Haul nazi organization Patriot Front.
https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/patriot-front-fraud-and-fakery

It's a great day to be floofy #CaturdayEve

Here's an updated look at the sources cited in Community Notes fact checks on X/Twitter.

The most interesting finding: the frequency with which the "reliable source" cited in the fact check is itself an X post has steadily increased.

More detail here: https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/more-fun-with-community-notes-data

The spam posts did not originate on Bluesky; they were originally created on Nostr, pushed to Mastodon, and then subsequently to Bluesky. Although Bluesky quickly removed the spam, the original Nostr posts are still available for study.

It's a great day to read about a botnet that recently spammed social media platform Bluesky with duplicate pro-Trump posts.

It's a great day to read about a spammy real estate Substack blog with the catchy title "Realtors @ Substack", allegedly written by "Alexa Grace Kern", an author with a GAN-generated face. (There are a few other oddities as well.)
https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/this-real-estate-blogger-does-not

It's a great day to read about a (hacked) Facebook page that has racked up nearly 200K followers by posting AI-generated images of alleged barndominiums.

(Also, I have now learned that the word "barndominium" exists thanks to Facebook spam.)

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/this-barndominium-does-not-exist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdR_t48gsZQ

#FlashbackFriday: Here's an article about a network of automated retweet spam accounts that allegedly existed to promote taxi companies and other businesses in Virginia and DC, but spent most of their time retweeting political tweets.
https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/flashback-friday-taxi

Reports of the effectiveness of paid verification at preventing spam have been somewhat exaggerated. Here's an analysis of a spam botnet on X consisting of over a thousand accounts with paid blue verification checkmarks.
https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/the-nine-thousand-dollar-botnet

Here's a look at an X account with a GAN-generated face and a plethora of oddly convenient anecdotes. This is a case where any given anomaly could have a valid explanation, but the sheer number of red flags overwhelmingly point toward the account being fake.

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/tall-tales-and-fake-faces

Cryptocurrency/NFT spam from blue check accounts has become a recurring theme of advertising on X/Twitter in recent months. I kept track of the crypto spam ads I was served over the course of two days and did some analysis of the accounts involved.
https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/blue-checks-ads-and-crypto-spam

Here's an article about a network of 575 spam accounts on X/Twitter that describe themselves as "politics enthusiasts". Come for the artificially generated faces, stay for the artificially generated text and accompanying error messages!

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/gan-tastic-politics-enthusiasts

None of these people exist, but you can buy their books on Amazon anyway. Here's an article on Amazon authors with GAN-generated faces and the books these authors publish (which appear to be almost entirely devoid of original human-created content).

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/none-of-these-people-exist-but-you

How does one go about finding social media spam networks? Sometimes the best way is to go a site where spammers hang out and start poking around.

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/to-find-spam-networks-go-where-the

Here's a Substack article on the fascinating and delightful phenomenon of Gofundme repost spam on X/Twitter. (Needless to say, this is yet another thing that would be way easier to study if the Twitter API was still available.)

https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/crowdfunding-and-platform-manipulation