A researcher analyzed thousands of Twitter profiles and discovered a network of fake profiles that all do the same things.
That Twitter is a social full of bots and fake profiles is known to everyone, including Twitter. That kittens are depopulated not only on Twitter, but in almost every social is equally well known. That porn and sports betting are two of the spammer's favorite industries is even more well known. Putting all these known things together, however, comes the discovery made by Conspirador Norteño, a Twitter profile that defines itself as a "Data Scientist/Musician/Participant in the General Confusion".
The discovery, made public by Vice.com, concerns a network of 3,204 fake profiles that tweet assiduously in Turkish on just two topics: porn (and adult services) and sports betting. All of these profiles have a picture of one of these three types: cats, avatars of anime characters or human faces that don't exist, generated by a GAN network. That is, a network of Generative adversarial networks algorithms, complex machine learning codes.
The discovery of Turkish kittens on Twitter
The work done by Conspirador Norteño on Twitter is impressive: he analyzed 17.
The work done by Conspirador Norteño on Twitter is impressive: he analyzed 17,957 accounts of a botnet of fake followers, i.e. profiles offered for sale to aspiring influencers in search of easy likes and retweets, and found 8,727 with faces generated by algorithms, kittens and souls.
Including these, about 3,204 are part of a subnet that would currently serve adult sites in Turkish. All of these accounts are very young: they were created as of January 25, 2021.
They all do the same things: they either retweet tweets from a few specific accounts, or post tweets with images about pornographic themes and sports betting. It is, therefore, a carefully organized operation on a large scale.
The rules of Twitter
All this is a clear violation of the rules of Twitter, which expressly prohibits the use of bots (especially if managed in a network between them) in order to "push" certain content. Even more so if it is adult material.
Just in Turkey, Twitter has already knocked out thousands of fake profiles, including those of a botnet whose purpose was to artificially promote President Erdogan's party.
Conspirador Norteño, on the other hand, is now a researcher specialized in this phenomenon: in August 2020 he discovered another botnet, also in that case with computer-generated faces.