Follower farming shenanigans
In which a Bluesky feed devoted to a right-wing commentator suddenly transforms into a liberal followback account
Nothing says “unflinching honesty” quite like renaming one’s social media account and changing the profile photo to an AI-generated image. Meet self-proclaimed political scientist "Kathlyn Kannon” (@kathlynkannon.bsky.social), a Bluesky account with a StyleGAN-generated face that recently racked up thousands of followers over the span of just three days (March 7th-10th, 2025), mostly from liberal accounts, and managed to get itself included in multiple starter packs in the process. Shortly after the account’s authenticity was publicly questioned, it was deleted by its operator, and is offline as of the time of this writing.
The face image used as an avatar by “Kathlyn Kannon” shows several signs of being artificially generated. The boundaries between hair, skin, and background near the ears blend together in unrealistic ways in several places, and the cartilage in the visible ear is incorrectly rendered. The image also shows the telltale facial feature positioning found in StyleGAN-generated faces, which is extremely consistent from image to image. This trait becomes quite noticeable when multiple StyleGAN faces are blended together, as in the video below.
On March 7th, 2025, the operator of the “Kathlyn Kannon” account began following other Bluesky accounts en masse, at a rate of thousands per day. We can tell that the vast majority of the follows took place on or after this date because there are multiple accounts with March 7th, 2025 creation dates among the first hundred accounts followed by “Kathlyn Kannon”, so therefore all subsequent follows must have happened later. Roughly 60% of the accounts followed by “Kathlyn Kannon” followed the account back.
The accounts followed by “Kathlyn Kannon” were not chosen entirely at random. First, almost all are liberal English-language accounts, based on their biographies and recent content. Second, and more interestingly, the accounts followed by “Kathlyn Kannon” generally follow far more accounts than they have followers of their own. The operator of the “Kathlyn Kannon” account presumably selected these accounts to follow under the assumption that they were less picky about who they follow, and therefore would be more likely to blindly follow back. This assumption appears to have been valid, as the accounts that followed “Kathlyn Kannon” follow on average almost twice as many accounts as they have followers of their own.
One final interesting detail: “Kathlyn Kannon” wasn’t always named “Kathlyn Kannon”. At the time of creation in November 2024, the account had the handle @hananiadailyposts.bsky.social, which it retained until March 7th, 2025, when the handle was changed to @kathlynkannon.bsky.social. This is the same day that the account began following liberal Bluesky users en masse.
A snapshot of the account’s profile found in a list of the official @bsky.app account’s followers downloaded on November 15th, 2024 reveals that its biography at the time was “Daily posts from Richard Hanania's substack and twitter”, a reference to right-wing political commentator Richard Hanania. The abrupt change of account name and apparent political stance are both further indications that the account is, or rather was, inauthentic.
how did you collect the data?
Alliterative name, perfectly centered eyes, out of focus hair and no hands in pic.
I bet her middle name is Kellie, too.