This city council member does not exist
Inauthentic social media accounts with artificially generated faces are a dime a dozen these days, but not all of them claim to be local elected officials
Atlanta City Council member Gabrielle Prooth has lived an interesting life. According to the biography on Prooth’s now-suspended Twitter account @proogb, Prooth was born in Germany, went to school with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, was fired from CNN in 2018, and has three children. There are, however, two inconvenient problems with this story: first, no one on the Atlanta City Council is named “Gabrielle Prooth”, and second, the @proogb Twitter account used a GAN-generated face as its profile image. (“GAN” is an acronym for “generative adversarial network”, the machine learning technology behind tools such as https://generated.photos.)
How can we tell that the “face” used by the now-suspended @proogb Twitter account is GAN-generated? The most obvious sign is the weird flesh-colored patches in the eyeglasses where one would expect the background to be visible. Additionally, the lenses aren’t the same shape, the visible ear appears to lack an ear canal, and the facial feature placement is consistent with unmodified StyleGAN-generated face images. (The latter anomaly is easy to see when multiple GAN-generated faces are blended together.)
The @proogb Twitter account frequently tweeted about politics — but not local Atlanta politics as one might expect an account belonging to a city council member to do. It did, however, speak up regularly in support of the 2022 Canadian trucker convoy and in opposition to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The account also regularly tweeted conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims about U.S. President Joe Biden and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, including:
claims that the Biden administration is laundering money for a future presidential campaign via the war in Ukraine
claims that Biden is creating a “white supremacy army”
Prior to 2022, the @proogb account tweeted very different content, and one point even had a different name. Back in 2020, the account had the handle @loromanova; we can tell based on the account’s numeric ID (1230579416666955776), which remains constant even if the account’s handle is changed. The display name was also different — “Alex Romanova” rather than “Gabrielle Prooth” — and the profile image was a different GAN-generated face. The account’s earliest tweets (deleted sometime prior to September 2022) were in Russian rather than English. Based on the translations provided by Google Translate, the now-deleted content appears to be somewhat disdainful toward Russia, but this assessment should be taken with the caveat that machine translation is a far from perfect art.
By late 2021, the @proogb account had switched languages to English and switched focus to cryptocurrency giveaway spam, and shortly into 2022 it morphed into “Gabrielle Prooth”, nonexistent Atlanta city council member and Canadian trucker convoy supporter. It is unclear at this time who actually ran the account, nor whether it retained the same operator throughout its various changes in persona. In any event, the political career of this inauthentic government official was short-lived — Twitter permanently suspended the account on September 23rd, 2022.
This research was originally presented in this September 2022 Twitter thread:
