A Trump-supporting computer-generated Instagram personality says it has hacked the Instagram account of a much more popular CG Instagram celebrity.
According to most profiles of her, Lil Miquela is a “19-year-old Brazilian-American Instagram influencer.” She’s not an actual person—her photos look as though a Pixar character was put into real-life situations—but she’s managed to rack up nearly a million followers nonetheless. Her Instagram features photos of her leaning on a sports car, taking mirror selfies with friends, hanging out in photo booths, etc.
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Tuesday, hundreds of her photos were deleted and replaced with selfies of another CG Instagram personality named “Bermuda,” who claimed to hack her account. Motherboard could not independently verify whether or not the account was actually hacked or this is some elaborate CG-avatar art project collaboration, but Lil Miquela’s photos have definitely been deleted, and a tweet from her verified Twitter account says “Guys i’ve been hacked – it’s NOT me!!”
“Hi guys! Bermuda here,” a caption for a new photo on Miquela’s account reads. “Soooo… you’re being lied to by a fake a*s person. Literally who is buying this for one second? Apparently a lot of you. …Sorry, Miquela. I tried to DM, I tried to call but you ‘stay curving’ me. You brought this on yourself, girl 😘 Leave me a comment if you care about the truth, k? 😘 Go follow @bermudaisbae.”
Bermuda is a lower-res and more political blonde CG avatar. Her Instagram is filled with selfies, pro-Trump imagery, memes that are commonly traded by the far right, and threats to Lil Miquela’s account dating back to at least September 2017.
The beef here seems to be that Lil Miquela—despite obviously being computer generated—generally pretends to be a real human whereas Bermuda is up-front about the fact that she’s an art project.
Bermuda’s account says she’s a project by an entity called Cain Intelligence (Lil Miquela’s profile was also changed to include a link to Cain Intelligence), which bills itself as “leaders in machine learning and artificial intelligence.” The site says it was made by someone named Daniel Cain and includes an endorsement for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“Bermuda is the first of her kind,” the site says. “Built to speak her truth and to the interests of today’s youth, she is uniquely unapologetic, representing not only a breakthrough in artificial intelligence but also in modern political thought.”
A tweet sent to Cain Intelligence by Motherboard was not returned; there is no contact information for the company on its website, and a WHOIS lookup of its domain name did not return any contact information. An email sent to the address listed on Lil Miquela’s official website was not returned immediately. Instagram did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
