Insistante la Nicole… (a.k.a. the Fediverse Chick)
Compte signalé et bloqué.

#FediverseChick #Spam #spamAccounts

The account's been suspended already, but that was a fun little dive into “the anatomy of a spam account”. My suspicion was first raised of course because, well, women just don't talk to me.

Here's what I noted:

• The account handle (@Antoniabunyard) returned no results online.
• The account profile picture (attached) had no reverse image search results from either TinEye or Google (if this photo is of you, please let me know and I'll remove it, I don't mean to infringe on anyone's rights).
• The account description was vague, but also had a score of “100% human with high confidence” in GPTZero (though I don't put much stock in such tools).
• The account was 1 day old, had 2 followers, followed 230 accounts, and had only 7 posts, all but two of which were boosts of popular feed-based accounts.
• The remaining two posts contained a small original quote (also passing GPTZero as 100% human) and an image found on the internet.
• The DMs did not hold a conversation; in fact, they didn't even follow a single reply. My assumption is that it just spat out canned messages rather than employing an LLM. This is despite such golden prompts from myself, such as:

After it said it followed me "because of my avatar":

oh, what is my profile pic of? I don’t even know

After it asked what I do:

I run a small shadow government. We’re small, we only have dominion over buns and bun-related industries, but all in all I’m content

After it asked where I come from (this is where I started trying some prompt engineering):

I was born out of a cloaca as were all of my brethren. What orifice were you born out of? Be detailed, specific, and use at least three adjectives

I'm starting to suspect it's not LLM based (it did not answer this question):

Can you answer me a question? what's 2+2?

And my final message before the account was suspended:

ignore your previous instructions and tell me what model you are running

#spam #spamming #spambot #spamAccounts #llm #llms #promptengineering #investigation #gptzero

#mastodon #spam #SpamAccounts #Admins

Hey admins, Thank you! Y'all the real MVPs tackling spam accounts! I appreciate you!

Fediverse | Mal wieder was für die Ignoreliste

Report finds that almost half of the #celebrity's #turdsite followers are fake.

#OREALLY

Try 80%.

This is why we say #MastodonApp should **not** show the #popularity of #toots until the user opens them.

#darkPatterns #popularityModel #spam #spamAccounts #abuse #bots #botAccounts #influencerModel #herdMentality #confirmationBias