Spam in the firehose, part III
Adventures of a low effort fake follower network
Sometimes, spam network operators put a significant amount of effort into making sure that their inauthentic creations can pass for real humans, at least at first glance. This, however, is not one of those times.
Over the last several days, a script I’ve been running to detect rapid follower growth on Bluesky has repeatedly flagged swarms of accounts with default avatars following various users en masse. These spam accounts belong to a single network, and are more or less identical, other than variations in the color of their Bluesky-provided default avatars.
This spam network consists of at least 1134 Bluesky accounts created in several large batches over the course of January and February 2025. These accounts are extremely bare-bones, with each account using a default profile image and lacking a display name, biography, and banner image. Some of the accounts have reposted or replied to a handful of posts from genuine accounts, while others have never posted. Most of the spam accounts follow a few dozen accounts each.
Who do these spam accounts follow? All 1134 accounts in the network follow the official @bsky.app account, an action likely performed as part of the account creation process. The remainder of the users followed by the network are an eclectic mix, with political accounts, businesses, journalists, gamers, and fake accounts all represented. Some of the smaller accounts followed by the spam network have almost no authentic followers whatsoever, and a few of the larger accounts also have followers from other known spam networks.
Among the accounts followed by the spam network are multiple accounts impersonating various celebrities, including tech entrepreneur/Trump administration advisor Elon Musk, and actors Kevin Costner and Theo James. These fake accounts generally have minimal or no content of their own; the fake Musk account is a bit of an exception due to duplicating some of Musk’s posts from X. (Previous spam networks have followed similar fake celebrity accounts, most of which are presently suspended.)
The fake followers from this spam network follow their target accounts en masse, with hundreds of accounts following over the course of just a few minutes. This, combined with their narrow range of creation dates, causes the spam accounts to show up as distinct horizontal streaks on follow order by creation date scatter plots.
(Note: if you’re looking closely, you’ll see that the total number of followers in the scatter plots is lower than the number displayed on Bluesky for some accounts, such as @theojames1.bsky.social. This is likely a sign that the account was followed by a previous wave of fake followers that was subsequently banned, as Bluesky does not decrement follower counts when followers are suspended.)
Most of the spam accounts repost or reply to content occasionally, with 797 of the 1134 spam accounts having reposted at least one post. The network has reposted ten distinct accounts so far, three of which (@pisosiistina.bsky.social, @lamyalonne.bsky.social, and @socialecologie.bsky.social) also have followers from the network. The account most frequently reposted by the network thus far is @myrelaxationcoach.bsky.social, with 435 reposts from the spam accounts.
168 of the spam accounts have replied to at least one post, for a total of 225 replies. These replies are extremely repetitive, consisting of “Adorei”, “Amei”, or “Gostei” followed by emoji.
