I’m surprised that this isn’t a much bigger story; I’m not seeing a lot of coverage on mainstream news sites, just these minor tech sites.
For a long time now, people have accused many, many, many Twitter users of being foreign bots created to sow division in American politics. Prompted by user requests, an X engineer said that they would add a feature that shows what country each account is originally from, even if they’re using a VPN.
Of course, this caused exactly the shitshow you would think it would cause. Massive MAGA accounts with profile pictures of white guys wrapped in American flags turned out to be posting from Nigeria or Bangladesh. Far left and far right accounts who claim to be American or British alike turn out to be registered to “Eastern Europe (non-EU)”. Other intensely political accounts commenting on US elections as if they are involved turned out to be from Canada, the Bahamas, or India. Accounts that claimed to be Palestinian and posted first hand accounts of the war turned out to be from Poland, or the Philippines, and so on. (Hilariously, there was a “Palestinian” account that was particularly fond of telling Israelis to “go back to Poland” that turned out to be posting from Poland! Maybe his real motivation was the economic revitalization of Poland through Israeli immigration…)
Anyways, since many of the X accounts outed as foreign were among Elon’s favorites to retweet racist tweets from turned out to be Pakistani, Nigerian, or from the Bahamas(or my favorite, from "Eastern Russia (Non EU), the feature was promptly disabled.
IMHO we need to bring this feature back for ALL social media platforms, at least for all accounts above X followers (maybe 10,000), and give it legal force so we can be certain these countries are accurate.
Ah, I saw this whole debacle talked about on one of the Discord channels I visit. Very symbolic, both in so many of those “patriotic” posters Musk liked being non-American, and Musk’s solution being to hide the information.
Probably not that long, which is why I think it should he mandated and enforced by law. That said you’d have to create new accounts that you’re tricking, not existing ones. This information is about where the account was created, not where it’s posting from now.
The bit I can’t wrap my gray matter around is how Space Karen could possibly have not known that this would be the result of implementing a location feature…
He lives in his own information bubble, where he’s actually popular among real Twitter Americans, not just being propped up by foreign bots paid by Russia.
This is wild speculation on my part, but… People have been asking for this feature for literally years, and nothing happened. Then the other day someone asked an engineer who was chatting in a Twitter thread about it, and he said “sure”.
Ok, that part wasn’t wild speculation, it’s what I read online about this story. But here’s the speculative part. What if Elon did not want this and so didn’t let this happen previously, but this engineer saw the idea “in the wild”, hadn’t been told not to do it yet, and so just went ahead and implemented what he thought was a very obvious and very simple feature.
I’m reading now that the locations ARE STILL THERE, at least partially. Apparently they removed the “account created in” field but are planning to add it back “by Thanksgiving”, and the “Based In” field is still there.
This is a user specific setting. By default X shows your country but you can change that to “region”. Hence, all the “Eastern Europe (Non-EU)” accounts - no one posting politically wants to admit they’re Russian or Belarusian.
Generally speaking, if the account shows a region instead of a country, I’d assume they’re posting from the country that would make them look worst for the type of content they post; after all, you have to opt in to show region rather than country.
This. Musk is somebody who has spent his life surrounded with yes men and is convinced of his own genius and popularity. Because that’s what all the people around tell him.
Then periodically he runs into evidence he’s wrong about something, and handles it the only way he knows how: panics, suppresses the leaks of facts into his bubble and if he can substitutes a more tolerable lie. It wouldn’t be surprising if he has a new version rolled out that allows those foreign accounts to claim to originate in the US so he can keep pretending they are.
