Accelerationism, spam, and video games
The #Accelerationism hashtag has been a repeated target of bizarre spam campaigns on multiple social media platforms
Over the last two years, networks of spammy accounts using the #Accelerationism hashtag have repeatedly popped up on multiple social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The accounts in these networks post a mix of politically-themed content and content related to auto racing video games, primarily the “Need for Speed” franchise. This content is highly repetitive, with multiple accounts frequently posting the same text, image, or video. Additional signs of inauthenticity abound: many of the accounts in these networks use plagiarized profile photos, and their content has sometimes received amplification from paid engagement botnets. Although the major social media platforms periodically suspend these accounts, replacements seem to inevitably show up.
On Twitter, the political content posted by these networks consists of repetitive tweets with a few recurring themes:
The U.S. is in a state of decline (posts about power grid issues, COVID death toll, etc)
China is more stable than the U.S.
People want to leave the U.S. but are unable to
These repetitive tweets generally include the #Accelerationism hashtag (and frequently other hashtags as well). Identical tweets are not always posted simultaneously by each account that duplicates them; in some cases, two different accounts tweeted the same text weeks or months apart.
As with their political tweets, the tweets these networks post about the “Need for Speed” video game franchise are repetitive and contain the #Accelerationism hashtag. Almost all of these tweets contain images, generally screenshots from various “Need for Speed” games. Some of the accounts in these networks post both political and video game-themed spam, while others post content from only one of these two categories.
On at least one occasion, #Accelerationism spam on Twitter was retweeted by accounts from a paid amplification botnet affiliated with the website ssh-mohd.com. The tweets boosted by this botnet all wound up with dozens of retweets but zero likes, which differs sharply from organic usage patterns.(Human users generally like tweets 2-3 times as often as they retweet them.) The ssh-mohd.com website is in Arabic, and most of the (now-suspended) accounts that retweeted the #Accelerationism spam had Arabic profiles.
Social media spam accounts frequently use plagiarized profile photos, and the #Accelerationism Twitter spam networks are no exception to this rule. Reverse image searches reveal that pretty much any photograph of an actual human used by one of these spam networks is either a stock photo or an image with a lengthy history of being posted on various websites.
Twitter is not the only social media platform where this type of #Accelerationism spam has turned up. A quick search of Facebook for the #Accelerationism hashtag turns up some very familiar-looking posts about problems with the power grid in various major U.S. cities. These posts contain both similar language to and some of the same images as their Twitter counterparts.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook also contains #Accelerationism spam related to “Need for Speed”, which (much like the Twitter spam) features screenshots from the “Need for Speed” games. One recently active network of Facebook #Accelerationism spam accounts used StyleGAN-generated faces as profile images.
These StyleGAN face images have been cropped so that they are no longer square, but since they’ve been cropped in an identical fashion, the eyes are still in the same position on each image. The images also contain other anomalies indicating their artificial origin such as strange headgear, unrealistic teeth, and artifacts where hair meets the face or background.
Video platform YouTube also plays host to #Accelerationism spam networks. As with the Twitter and Facebook spam, both political and “Need for Speed”-themed material turns up. Unsurprisingly, many of the YouTube spam accounts use plagiarized profile photos.
What is the goal of these ongoing spam campaigns? It’s possible that this is a long-term effort to flood searches for the term “accelerationism” with specific content (or meaningless content). It also could be an attempt to inject political material related to the U.S. and China into online discussions of the “Need for Speed” video games (or vice versa), or it could be something else entirely. In any event (and in spite of frequent account suspensions), whoever is running these spam networks has been at it for at least a couple of years and seems disinclined to stop anytime soon.
This is almost certainly a campaign to defend Xi Jinping. In Chinese, 'Accelerator in Chief' (总加速师) has been a common nickname to mock Xi and his harmful policies. Critics have also often commented 'accelerate' (加速) on posts about Xi or the CCP taking measures they perceive to be negative for China and hastening the demise of the CCP if not the PRC itself. Whoever is running the campaign probably isn't aware that the English translation of these terms are almost never used to criticise Xi, which is why it seems rather bizarre.
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/总加速师
This was awesome. Thanks for all your work :)