These Dodgers employees do not exist

In which a group of fake Facebook accounts masquerades as Los Angeles Dodgers staff members for no apparent reason

we are totally real people who work for the Dodgers, just trust us

Sometimes the purpose of a network of fake social media accounts is obvious, but this is not one of those times. While scrolling through the followers of various spammy Facebook pages, I noticed an account named “Winnie Winnie” with an AI-generated face, accompanied by an unlikely claim of employment with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Recursive exploration of “Winnie Winnie’s” friends led to a network of bogus Los Angeles Dodgers Facebook accounts, with a mix of artificially generated faces and duplicate photos of real people as profile images. Most of these accounts have no content other than avatar and banner images, making it difficult to discern their mission at the present time, but they are definitely bogus.

what does it mean to study at the Los Angeles Dodgers, really?

This network consists of at least 80 Facebook pages falsely claiming to be Dodgers staff members. Due to the relatively manual data collection process used, it is likely that some accounts were missed, and there are indications that similar networks of fake Lakers and Angels employees are being set up as well. Each account claims to live in Los Angeles, and lists the Los Angeles Dodgers as an employer, school, or both. Each account in the network is friends with at least one other account in the network, and most are friends with multiple.

none of these people exist, but reality is no barrier to joining Facebook

48 of the accounts in the network use StyleGAN-generated faces as their profile images. Many of these images contain obvious indicators of their artificial origin, such as surreal backgrounds and clothing, mismatched earrings, and bizarre boundaries between hair and other elements of the image. In a few cases, a portion of a distorted secondary “face” (sometimes known as a “side demon”) is visible to the left or right of the main face.

The most consistent fingerprint of unmodified StyleGAN faces is the placement of the primary facial features, particularly the eyes, which are in the same position on every single image. This anomaly becomes particularly obvious when multiple “faces” are blended together, as seen in the above video. This detection method can be disrupted somewhat by rotating or cropping the images, a tactic which has been used by spam networks here and there.

The remaining 32 accounts in the fake Dodgers employee network all use the same photograph of an unknown person sitting in an office as an avatar.

either human cloning has gone mainstream or these are fake accounts (they’re fake accounts)

Almost all of these accounts’ activity thus far consists of (likely bogus) check-ins, mostly at locations in the Los Angeles area. A few of the accounts also have supposed check-ins at The Kabbalah Centre Washington DC Study Group in Washington, DC. Since Facebook users can check in to arbitrary locations regardless of the user’s position in the physical world, there is no reason to believe that these check-ins tell us anything meaningful about the location of the account operator(s). The check-ins have been occurring periodically on at least some of the accounts for roughly a year.

fake people checking into locations, some of which may also be fake

One of the more interesting locations that several of the fake accounts have supposedly “checked in” at is an automatically generated unofficial page with the title “Los Angeles Cityhall” (sic). Most, and possibly all, of the check-ins at this alleged location are from fake accounts, many with AI-generated faces, including but not limited to the fake Los Angeles Dodgers employees. As with the network itself, the purpose of the misspelled location and the check-ins there are unclear at this time.

the “Los Angeles Cityhall”, famous for skiing and fake accounts