Turkish-speaking cats at center of Twitter bot porn network

Thousands of Turkish-speaking Twitter accounts displaying computer-generated images of cats and women were found to be part of a network of bots, American media outlet Vice reported. The cats and women mostly spoke about porn, betting, and adult entertainment.

Monday February 22 2021 02:10 pm

Duvar English

A freelance data scientist who goes by the name "Conspirador Norteño" discovered a massive network of Twitter bots who chat in Turkish about pornography and sports betting, American-Canadian new outlet Vice reported on Feb. 16.

With computer-generated photos of humans and cats created by generative adversarial network technology, the fake accounts in question are harder to spot thanks to advanced artificial intelligence, which allows the accounts to appear authentic.

More than 3,000 members of the network were detected, who mostly followed and interacted with each other, Conspirador Norteño said, adding that they often created repetitive content about adult services.

What do these accounts do, other than follow each other? 218 have never tweeted; the remainder reply to other tweets, tweet original tweets containing images (mostly porn/escort service ads), and tweet repetitive tweets (again, mostly porn/adult services stuff). pic.twitter.com/dYCPG9G1ke
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) February 14, 2021

Most of the network's members were headshots of women, all posed against a white backdrop, although some were computer-generated images of cats.

Although images created with generative adversarial network technology can include some abnormalities, such flaws were hard to spot in images as small as the Twitter user photographs, Conspirador Norteño added.

Cyber crimes are common in Turkey both in the form of misinformation spreading like these Twitter bots did, but also in ways that essentially rob people through faulty merchandise or fake sales.

Topics Twitter Turkey Turkish Twitter Turkey Social media in Turkey