Unlimited Bots - The Engine Behind Twitter

foreign this video is brought to you and therefore funded by incogny stick around here more about the special offer they are providing to the entire upper echelon community and please keep in mind that projects like this aren't free and sponsors are the only reason I can even do them if you have any genuine interest in their product please use the link down below today's video is

which is a horrifying prospect that rapidly approaches every single day as we make strides in AI content generation that we are holistically unprepared for as a nation or even a species suffice it to say I'm an AI pessimist if you will right now but the scope of my social experiment rapidly expanded beyond the simple Prospect of manufacturing a digital Persona despite that angle being very much

successful and yielding extremely interesting results so far what started as a web of social media purchases which I'll detail in just a minute turned into an examination of what might actually be one of the largest bot networks on all of Twitter with an entire underground ecosystem and economy of compromised account resale bought it metrics and thousands of online people businesses rappers B and C tier celebrities

or actors minor political figures news agency impersonators and more which are either built on compromised profiles bought it in totality by the network I specifically am tracking verified by Twitter blue some of them yet seem to be falsified completely or some other form of very obvious inauthentic activity basically I started by trying to prove that AI is now a threat to the online world because it

can seamlessly craft fake identities and I ended by creating research burner accounts to track a bot network two layers down through mutual followers and uncovered the largest continuous example of underground social media activity that I've ever seen let's dive in it all started with an idea take the newly exploding image generation capabilities of AI and craft a Persona my theory was that if done properly I

could create a person generate images of that person create social media for them even use their voice if necessary through a program called 11 Labs purchase bought traffic for those profiles in order to create a sense of authority and legitimacy and trick the world into believing that I was real allowing for a spectacular reveal later down the line if it was successful that video is still

possible actually it's likely to happen in the future owing to relative success but contrary to my initial plan I started to get knocked off track pretty quickly let me explain the very first thing I did was come up with a name an inside joke even because if my ultimate intention was to go public with all this I had to make it at least slightly entertaining here's

what I came up with Cynthia Talbot synth bought Cynthia Talbot was an aspiring marketing executive she was a former model who had had her accounts compromised and all her photos were to be generated using a platform called Deep agency I won't lie this was actually kind of painful it's a great service it really is but it takes time to sit there generating and regenerating images of

a synthetic blonde woman who needs to have plausibly similar facial features and bone structure in order to pass but he here's what I came up with I haven't used all of these so far I could do a few more Finishing Touch edits in Photoshop if I needed to not anymore I guess this particular identity is now burned by making it public when I think about it

but after a couple lengthy sessions I was able to create a library of what seemed to be authentic looking photographs that might pass for a real person successful next I had to get the accounts up and running first was Gmail to tie everything to as a central Hub then came Facebook but I wanted to add a little bit more impact so I took to the internet

and started to scout for buyable social media accounts with large pre-existing followings this is where one could argue that I was engaging with an unethical system and that would most likely be true but for a side project of mine as I conclude this particular version of my social experiment I'll be making it a personal project to get the accounts returned to their original owners I don't

even know if that's possible I have no idea how or who to contact at Microsoft Twitter and Facebook to do this but I'm working on it sponsor Time online security and privacy protection needs an extremely Pro active approach every day your data is being sold by third party Brokers or accessed without your knowledge in data breaches to be perfectly honest for some people there's basically nothing

you can do about this owing to the sheer number of places you're willing to post your personal information without concern but for anyone who wants to prevent that kind of thing today's video sponsor can help companies maintain a lot of your personal information in their records and not just the ones you know about or deliberately signed up for but other data firms as well who then

sell it all across the internet for everyday users it's a nearly impossible task to take any sort of action because there are hundreds of these data Brokers and it's a lengthy process to contact them all fight objections and get your data removed however Incognito does all of this for you quickly and easily the process is extremely simple sign up for the website give them specific legal

permission to work on your behalf in this particular capacity and let them know what kind of information they will be having removed I did this myself I have personally used the service as I do with all my sponsors and I stand by the results plus it is a service created by a long-standing channel partner called surfshark the first 100 people to click the link Down Below

in the description and use code Echelon and checkout will get 60 off their subscription to incogni again link down below and promo code Echelon for the first 100 viewers who use it to get 60 off their subscription big thank you to incogni for sponsoring the channel anyway back on task as I browsed I started to find that there was absolutely no shortage of offers in fact

there were dozens of sites thousands of sellers probably millions of accounts and I could basically pick and choose what I wanted and theoretically I could choose how it was crafted I'm not going to advertise the specific websites that I used I think ethically I should avoid the prospect of this becoming an actual guide on how to do this stuff because it's prevalent enough already without me

making it worse even though it's not exactly hard and you could be up and running in about 45 minutes ish if you wanted to but I used four different websites there were three vendors and one metric service that I engaged with and obviously before doing so I emulated my payment details through a service called privacy which basically lets you use burner credit cards of sorts or

debit cards that are tied into your real bank account to protect your information for obvious reasons I would never be using my actual credit cards to engage with a project like this through these vendors some purchases were better some were worse of course I managed to buy one Twitter account with a little over 60 000 followers at the time one instagram account with a little over

I think a hundred thousand followers and then another Twitter account with about 40 000 followers this time but that one had a few issues and was a freshly compromised account where someone had been actively using the email address until just a couple days prior so obviously I was never going to use that and I'm just trying to get that returned to the person who originally owned

it long story short in order to get the first two accounts I had to VPN myself somewhere else log into my now useless burner account on binance the crypto exchange from right when binance first got started send them some of my random [__] coins that I no longer care about to one of the vendors in what effectively amounted to a trust trade which he did honor

by the way and then get the credentials back which came complete with the social media login credentials as well as the backup email credentials they did technically provide an escrow service of sorts but since I was just getting rid of all my wiped out crypto from like six or seven years ago that's right crypto Bros I was into Bitcoin since long before any of you even

knew what it was I survived gox without losing any of my money I was in it before binance and FTX even existed so don't start with me on how misunderstood and great crypto is or how it fixes all the Trad five problems because it doesn't it now is one of the systemic problems and the entire Community should be completely ashamed of what they have allowed their

beloved industry to become sorry a bit of a rant there but honestly it's necessary to call them out where was I so after vpning my ass all over the world getting details setting up accounts changing credentials you name it I was ready to start my foray into the digital project of babysitting a social media identity of sorts that was completely generated by AI this is where

I need to do a bit of a short summary because the long form would be its own entire video it is a video I am intending to make in the future but for right now it goes a little bit like this Facebook unexpectedly is by far the best platform when it comes to moderating inauthentic or bought behavior and flagging fake accounts by far it's not even

close however that's a double-edged sword within hours of creating my account and populating it with AI generated photos even just a few of them I was receiving messages from real men who thought I was real and were asking me how I was or how we might get to know each other or [__] like that that was a shock because you wouldn't catch me dead messaging a

profile that was created that very same day filled out all the info within two hours had zero friends and three pictures that at the time weren't even the best ones I managed to generate and had multiple glaringly obvious flaws in essence the virality and prevalence of romance scamming facilitated by Ai and fake pictures that are crafted with language output algorithms or whatever it is is about

to go parabolic romance scams or shazu pan as they're called also known as the pig butchering is predominantly located in Asia and requires crime syndicates to spend exorbitant amounts of money on actual photo shoots with real girls who travel to different areas and craft stylized identities to Target specific victims there are even training manuals on this or script manuals detailed manuals that provide a dedicated structure

to a purpose-driven Workforce as they approach trick and then destroy their victims all around the world it's an industry with AI the cost the relative cost right instead of costing thousands of dollars to do photo shoots with girls and ship them around the world so you can get photos in front of landmarks like there's some pretty dedicated stuff that they do but right now facilitated by

AI the cost is falling to roughly twenty dollars a month where anyone can do it they can craft a fake persona with photorealistic detail if they know how to prompt the AI brace yourselves from what I found Facebook is Ground Zero for that within hours messages started popping up and I can't actually show any of this right now because like I said Facebook though anything but

perfect is by far the best social media platform at identifying and preventing impersonators or bot activity I was suspended within a week on that account where a government issued ID verification was needed to unlock the account and every further account I made with the same credentials as Cynthia Talbot even if I used my VPN and other email addresses and things like that and made moderate efforts

to circumvent it obviously I probably could have tried to fake a license or a government-issued ID but that's just not a line I'm willing to cross obviously so that was a dead end as soon as Facebook really had me nailed down and wasn't allowing me to make a fake AI profile I was kind of stuck when it came to that particular platform now part of why

that happened is probably my own fault as I started to get messages from random men I would reply to them with a standard response so something like this account is being run as a social experiment it was a really clean cut and I find myself wondering if that made some of them report me maybe they filed a complaint that I was fake because they had messaged

a brand new profile and it turned out to be a journalist experiment which is probably embarrassing for them but honestly I'll probably never know precisely what happened it is what it is the point is Facebook is the best at sniffing out bot activity and preventing it so far from my research with their heavy focus on tying people to their real names for Better or For Worse

that's up to you but it's also Ground Zero for romance scamming and it was very clear that with maybe a couple weeks I could easily very easily have had victims on the hook with nothing other than AI generated images and maybe some Voice still that was just the beginning next I began cultivating the Twitter account that I had purchased but this led me to an interesting

realization the Twitter account was completely comprised of bought it accounts with fake profiles this was not organically grown which well I wasn't explicitly led to believe that it would be but it it seemed to insinuate that this was an organically grown matured and aged profile or built over time through tweetdeck or something like that no no not true this was a profile that had been scrubbed

and then bought it to a high number of followers in order to specifically be resold to someone like me honestly I respect the hustle I knew what I was getting into but with zero engagement a follower count dropping by the day as Twitter banned incremental numbers of bots here and there it wasn't really going to do me much good thankfully I actually was getting traction with

AI generated garbage tweets I was gaining followers following other people back and within the first few days I could see a decent number of legitimate accounts begin following me not small accounts either the speed and frequency that legitimate accounts would enter my Orbit was much faster than anything I could ever have expected or cultivated from an actual fresh account with no prior history on the platform

and I viewed the experiment to be a slow burn a very very slow burn but ultimately it was probably going to be successful then everything changed I had a realization this account was obviously bought it there was the evidence right in front of me of course undeniably but how could I explore it perusing the follower list I saw that before a certain point in time almost

every single account was a zero follower random string of numbers in the username obvious bot profile that followed hundreds of other accounts idea what if I made a burner account and followed all of Cynthia Talbot's fake followers what if I then used that research account as a sort of Geiger counter if you will to detect other profiles that had been hacked or stolen repurposed bought it

then sold and thus if it worked I had a video this part's very very important to engage with these Services I protected myself and I have no intention of making enemies over this what I am about to show you is just a slice of the Perpetual war between bot networks and social media Giants and while the window stays open because it is temporarily open now that

I found found this way to explore the bot Network and again it's very temporary I'm going to be removed from these accounts pretty soon or I'm going to lose access at any point in time but while it's there I want to explore it I very much want to show the extent of how far this goes and reiterate my point that pretty soon here nothing literally nothing

you see online or on social media will be trustworthy in the slightest not the information and especially not the people to properly delve into it I needed some kind of formula the simplest thing I came up with was create the burner follow Cynthia Talbot's followers and then check how far the botnet goes by exploring the list of other accounts that they follow now ideally I would

do this with all 60-ish thousand of her fake followers to get the best results and the most cross references and hits but I started running into a bit of a problem I would get locked out for hours at a time if I followed too many accounts too fast on Twitter eventually getting my entire research account locked completely after reaching something like 660 followed accounts with zero

of my own followers My rudimentary system wasn't going to work at scale and I wasn't going to spend months on end just checking in and following five or ten accounts every couple hours but honestly it didn't matter 600 accounts was a perfectly fine base level test to use for the video as long as I was smart with my other identifying factors here's the basic system I

came up with let's walk through it very straightforward this is my research burner account it's following about 600 people which are exclusively drawn from the followers of my AI driven purchased account called Cynthia Talbot now those followers are all Bots and I know this because of a specific set of criteria first look at the names name with long string of numbers that's one point that's worth

right that's worth one sign of a bot next check the followers and following if it's following hundreds of people with zero followers of its own two points sign of a bot next I check their tweet activity never liked a single thing retweeted a single thing or engaged with a single piece of content ever on Twitter in their entire lifespan and one point sign of a bot

and lastly date of creation within the last two months or three months that's one point as well probably a bot overall profiles must have had at least three points at least to be assumed as a bot and added to the test pool created recently zero activity and 400 followed accounts with no followers of its own I would assume that's a bot name with a massive string

of numbers zero activity created last week I'm assuming that's a bot you get the idea it's possible that I have a couple of false positives in here but it's highly highly unlikely and the gist of it is that this is a bot network with tens of thousands of accounts tied to it that is spun up and aimed in particular wherever someone out there wants to make

individual profiles bigger on command cool 600 Bots from the network as a basic sample what now now we take any of these Bots and look at the other accounts that it has been told to follow and this is our Target pool of sorts unlike the boss themselves this is a list of people that have verifiably interacted with the bot Network or been targeted by it and

now have high followers example right here Hunter Gaylord now to be clear every single person on this list has interacted with this bot Network in one way or another at some point in time it's just a matter of finding out in what capacity for Hunter he has 80 000 followers over 40 hits on the bot sample and a creation date of June 2016. here's how you

evaluate the profile or here at least is my methodology for evaluating all the different profiles that I chose first check the earliest available tweets for Hunter that's July of 2021 that's a five-year Gap in his activity very bad first sign next you check his relative activity Hunter has 80 000 followers but gets one or two interactions on all of his legitimate tweets bad sign and lastly

plugging him into socialblade a social tracker so words we can see that Hunter has crazy activity patterns that make absolutely no sense bottom line I can't say for certain if this is a stolen account that was boughted and resold I can't say whether Hunter is real and chose to bought his own account or if someone did it to him but I can say with absolute certainty

that this Wall Street advisor content host professional looking guy right here his social media is 100 percent fake that's one example there are hundreds of individual examples per account spread across tens of thousands of separate profiles in every single sector of Twitter's Community Health and Fitness media crypto especially crypto traditional Finance relationships Sports fashion and more here's the next guy down just right underneath uh whatever

his name was Hunter drez.eath Twitter blue verified 67 000 followers zero activity it's highly likely that this account was compromised stripped botted and is now just sitting there awaiting sail to whatever person wants a fresh out of the box crypto scamming profile that is pre-built to seem authoritative on Twitter checking socialblade he hasn't even been indexed yet because the credentials probably just got changed recently for

reference this is what a normal social blade profile should look like this is my now suspended account because I quoted Game of Thrones and said all men must die as a specific commentary on how hilariously botched Twitter's moderation was at the time and it's a far cry from anything you will find on the follower list of my research account this was organically grown this is my

account again that I organically grew I know for a fact over years and is very very easy to identify when you have a real account that someone was personally using for let's say seven years and grew it to like 18 20 000 followers versus an account that got bought it I mean it's it's night and day very distinctly different just one problem though this is where

I get bogged down collectively there are thousands of accounts that have been hacked wiped bought it resold to whoever owns them now where those accounts are pretending to be media Outlets CEOs analysts Traders gurus and more I could sit here and give examples all day for hours and hours straight probably for weeks but I'll contain it to a few of the more interesting ones here's some

sort of imposter Media company that just sprang up targeting Indonesia eight-month Gap in their history engaged with the bot Network verifiably impossibly low metrics freshly wiped on socialblade most likely hacked wiped bonded and purchased to launch a fake company I could be wrong but every single conceivable sign points to that being the case here's one Caesar on the moon web 3 Advocate to the Chinese people

whatever that means Chief technical officer somewhere Asia head game starter or something Community polka dot Ambassador and Technical advisor joined in December of 2015 but history only starts in 2022 28 hits on our tiny little bot Network sample and freshly wiped credential so that socialblade has not indexed it most likely hacked profile wiped botted sold to someone and here we are with yet another crypto professional

who appeared out of nowhere here's another one Tom and options and Futures Trader who supposedly joined Twitter in 2011 multiple hits on the bot sample 10 000 followers and supposedly a Twitter veteran from that far back in reality the account has no tweet history on it before February of this year with an absolute torrential downpour of tweets on March 13th in particular this is most likely

to bury the lack of feed content as far as possible so no one actually Scrolls back long enough to see it and if we check socialblade it's wiped again because the credentials have been changed great another fake Financial guy pretending to be real and definitely some people out there are buying a lot of these fake accounts not buying is in purchasing buying is in following them

and thinking that they're real people who are giving actual valuable advice these are imposters these are not real people how about this Cleopatra Fitzgerald supposedly a political figure and mayoral candidate 89 hits on the bot sample that's pretty high supposedly joined in 2011 as well in actuality tweet history only goes to 2021 with massive spam on specific days in between with a social blade history only

recently indexed very recently already losing tens of thousands of followers is this the real person is it a hacked account it's definitely a bought it account 100 with impossible engagement metrics what is really going on here's one that says India's leading English news channel called news x a million followers joined in 2009 that's an OG nope impossible metrics enormous swings and followers to the tune of

400 000 even in a single period with completely inauthentic patterns maybe not a hacked account maybe repurposed or wiped or I don't even know but a million followers and transparently bought it and we don't even know if it belongs to the person who we don't even know if it's a real thing behind this another crypto influencer this time named Ragnar this guy has hundreds of retweets

probably to bury the fact that his engagement is all sorts of screwed up and supposedly joined another one in 2011. strange Gap in activity since his first content on the timeline is from July of 2022 a bunch of hits on our botnet sample which is the lead indicator and if we check out socialblade he's just been systematically losing followers ever since the account got indexed again

most likely compromised account wiped bonded heavily sold Presto changeo brand new crypto influencer hits the scene better example this guy Amir Twitter blue verified over a hundred hits on the bot sample which is a lot joined in March of 2022 but there's a five month gap between creation date and first tweet activity socialblade freshly wiped not indexed yet or sorry unindexed now because the credentials changed

but this guy has 700 000 followers in less than one year with less than a hundred interactions per tweet no this is basically shooting fish in a barrel it is blatantly obvious when you look at pretty much any of these accounts that they were hacked bought it sold and turned into a social media imposter of sorts maybe not all of them some of these people merely

hired the botting services to give themselves some more followers but I have collectively found so far about 340 accounts collectively holding tens of millions of fake followers where most of them are clearly repurposed accounts that no longer belong to the original owners doctors analysts Bankers actors rappers Executives you name it everyone fake companies that have fake products that sprang up out of nowhere God knows what

they will do to you when you try to buy something from them fake news agencies I don't really even have the words because seeing it all laid out right in front of you is kind of sickening a lot of of people believe that they are interacting with legitimate people online they see high metrics and take that as trustworthy and never dig deeper but the truth is

we have no idea who we are talking to in the online world ever no idea none of all social media and I did run experiments on Facebook Instagram Twitter and then I happened to also be kind of an expert on YouTube now over the years Twitter is by far hands down the worst when it comes to bot activity I actually had trouble even getting Facebook accounts

fresh ones for sale but for Twitter there was a never-ending torrent of high follower profiles popping up for sale every single day of the week what I've discovered here is just a sample of the bot Network behind Twitter a small sample at that I believe that there's many other sections and that they compartmentalize it so that it doesn't get banned all at once but rest assured

there's more even though I've only seen a sample I found most of these and there are so many more examples that I obviously just can't include in the video just from a couple of the profiles attached to my one research burner account that only followed about one percent of the Bots that then follow Cynthia Talbot right so I've basically tapped into I don't know between one

and two percent of this bot Network and it's already in the tens of millions of followers and Views so take that for what you will I mean if that's one percent we're talking a billion views and a billion bonded followers over the course of all these different accounts I mean it's pretty staggering stuff and I'm not even done going through all of it yet I don't

even know how to catalog this much data I don't think I have the capability but the bottom line here is that there's almost certainly hundreds of millions of fake views and followers tied to this one particular Network that has industrialized the practice of compromising accounts wiping them botting them and then selling them specifically on Twitter to people in companies who want to cut corners or scam

Their audience here I was under the impression that Twitter actually wanted to fix the bot problem which is absolutely [__] hilarious when you think about Elon Musk talking about fixing the bots on Twitter good joke Elon in the end I started out on this journey by spending about eight hundred dollars in attempting to create an AI generated profile that fooled people into thinking it was real

that part worked immediately and easily but ultimately I discovered an even better topic as I explored the now colossal underground ecosystem of account selling and bought it engagement during the creation of this video I was able to conduct a couple of different interviews with dedicated sellers who actually purvey these accounts or you know had them as part of their offering some of them offloading hundreds of

accounts per week many times even earning the bulk of their income from selling fresh accounts with no followers but keep in mind I had to spoof my payment details I had to spoof my phone number and all of my other information just to safely interact with this industry I do not advise doing this it's against the terms of service I'm totally fine if they ban all

of my social media accounts I don't even want to be involved with social media anymore except for YouTube like I want to take my distance from it but the benefits absolutely do not justify the risk okay this is not something anyone should be doing it's a thing a lot of people do you but don't go treating this as like a tutorial on how to start up

a successful alt identity and get a bunch of work or scam a bunch of people in crypto this is just an analysis of the corrupt destructive piece of [__] platform that is Twitter however keep in mind that there is no guarantee on social media that anything you are looking at is real that's the underlying premise of all of this the photos can be AI we've gone

into a world where that's possible now you can have highly targeted photos that are constructed with AI models that look real they're photorealistic and you're going to be tricked by this people are going to be tricked by this the metrics can all be bought the comments can be bot networks that are paired with language models like chat GPT now the gpt4 is out oh my gosh

so basically all of it can be fake the voices can be fake using something like 11 Labs which is getting better by the day and the old school accounts on social media from like 2011 or 2013 Etc that are supposed to convey credibility and authenticity those are part of a massive underground economy that is commercialized the practice of building fake identities with fake followers and then

selling them to people for whatever they want to use them for be very very careful that's it if you want support please check out the links down below these videos are now requiring some actual investment to make Beyond just time on my part such as Consulting from a few people advice editing services that I commissioned account purchases in this case Etc et cetera so hopefully the

results are currently positive and the community is down for me to keep going let me know in the comments down below as always thank you all for watching there's a few other creators that are linked in the description as well but I'll cut it there and stop rambling have a nice night thank you [Music]