#FIX2020: these election deniers do not exist
Two years after the 2020 election, a group of Twitter accounts with artificially generated faces launched a coordinated hashtag campaign denying the outcome
Conspiracy theories regarding the outcome of the 2020 United States presidential election have continued to circulate in right-wing social media circles long after Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th U.S. President. Not of all of this discussion comes from authentic accounts, however. In March 2022, well over a year after the election, a network of extremely similar Twitter accounts with StyleGAN-generated faces kicked into gear tweeting and retweeting election denial content containing the hashtag #FIX2020. These accounts also featured the #FIX2020 hashtag in their profiles, which generally contained multiple US flag emoji. As of the time of this writing, all of the accounts in this network are suspended.
The #FIX2020 Twitter astroturf network consisted of 63 accounts, 47 of which used StyleGAN-generated faces as their profile “photos”. With the exception of @FIX2020usa (created in December 2020) and @JKenslay (created in January 2021), all of the accounts in this network were created between February 2022 and April 2022 (inclusive). The content tweeted by these accounts included frequent demands to decertify or otherwise invalidate the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The oldest account in the network, @FIX2020usa, went through several name and profile image changes before its final incarnation as part of the #FIX2020 network. Previous handles include @BFarmo and @TotalRecall2022. We can tell these are the same account because they all have the same permanent ID, 1338238186426937350.
StyleGAN-generated faces have a variety of fingerprints that reveal their artificial nature. Unless the images are cropped, resized, or rotated, the primary facial features are in the same position on each image, regardless of the orientation of the face. The eye placement is the most consistent, with both eyes located 1/8 of the way from the center of the image to the top in the vertical direction and halfway between the center and the edge in the horizontal direction. 31 of the 47 StyleGAN faces used by the #FIX2020 astroturf network are unmodified and have this trait, as shown in the video above. The remaining 16 StyleGAN faces used by the network have been cropped, and some of the backgrounds have been edited. Other indicators of the artificial nature of the images remain, however, such as surreal clothing, anomalies where the hair meets the face or background, and mismatched ears or earrings.
The accounts in the #FIX2020 astroturf network followed and retweeted one another, creating the illusion of an actual community. The follow network was reasonably dense, with each account following an average of 10 of the other accounts. Most of the accounts functioned primarily as amplifiers, retweeting the #FIX2020 tweets from six primary accounts rather than posting large numbers of their own tweets. The six primary accounts were @JKenslay, @FIX2020usa, @SpicySugar_69, @DFigurina, @HillaryClapton, and @beth_bistro.
The #FIX2020 astroturf campaign was not confined to Twitter. Equivalents of both the @FIX2020usa and @JKenslay accounts also existed on right-wing social media platform Gab. These two accounts used the same StyleGAN-generated faces as their Twitter equivalents, and boasted a number of followers with StyleGAN-generated faces. Unlike the Twitter accounts, which have all been permanently suspended, many of the Gab accounts still exist today.
A version of this analysis was originally presented in this Twitter thread.