Unfortunately, it requires 3 clicks ("account" -> "join date" -> "about account") to get the required information.
It should be visible on the post itself: where it was posted from, and where the author's account is mostly located. Just 2 little chips stuck on top of each and every post.
It wouldn't be difficult to include a little "" icon on each post that, when hovered, shows probable location or the creation origin. It's true that VPN's will often muddy this info, and even things like phone number confirmation for 2FA or billing address for Verified badges can't be 100% reliable... but it shouldn't be too difficult to say in those cases "User likely masking location" if the pattern is detected.
It's not about being easy it is about being profitable. I don't care where you fall politically, accounts like this increase engagement and thus profit. Companies like profit so this type of thing despite being much easier than some might assert is going to be slow to do. You can have legal requirements around identification for accounts over 2K followers. It basically would never inconvience people unless they are trying to be an influencer
The largest effect is that X suddenly (out of nowhere?) started to mention this, publicly. Which, given mr. Musk's political stance (who himself has been the target of a campaign, likely from mr. Putin), wasn't intended to have this effect.
If you were to share this information publicly from the start, the troll/propagandist/agent would know this information is being shared as-is from the start, and they could adapt. Very likely they would adapt. Therefore, the effect would be much less severe.
It is also very obviously PII, which would hurt innocent people (likely a minority but I can imagine it happening).
My take: intelligence agencies were already interested in said information and mr. Musk was like "whatever, we'll just share this with everyone".
russians been interfering with other countries through all possible channels for decades.
They integrated with every single Ukrainian election (including the most recent one in 2019), they tried hijacking (with various success) elections in Romania, Moldova, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Estonia, etc..
This includes radio, tv, printed periodics, social networks, even popular music, movies, tv series and books...
So how much are you willing to bet that this time it's definitely not russians?
Twitter can require verification on their end or require ID upload or something along those lines. The social media companies can solve this problem, it’s just way too profitable to not. They make a lot of money when you read about non-existent events from an account curated in China or India or Belarus and then go look at a bunch of ads for Patriot Bars (R) or Rainbow socks (L) or whatever.
They could by default for example require an identification of some sort, and then allow “non-ID” accounts to exist but require specific opt-in to view broadly or something along those lines.
More easily though you can just delete your account and then you don’t have to care about any of this crap.
There's already pretty sophisticated setups to get fake live ID verifications where it's already a cat and mouse game between the tools to verify and the tools faking live verifications (sometimes including just scamming people into acting as the 'user' for verification). Ideally I'd also not have to provide my ID for yet another inane service and risk that ID getting leaked as seems to be inevitable.
Yea that’s fair. I guess the easy/best solution is to just not use the product in that case.
But I’d be in favor of even an in-person verification system though the costs to do that would be unpalatable but I guess you could stand up a 3rd party to do that. Maybe there are better solutions out there that I’m not thinking of. I do know it’s very much against what the larger social media companies would want though because they actively want you to be outraged and misinformed since they make a lot of money off of that.
I wish they had included it as part of the RealID system. It would have been pretty easy to make them smart cards that could use simple public private key tech to verify IDs. Private keys go into the cards and public keys get registered with the state agency issuing the IDs. It's not perfect but it'd at least be a pseudonymous way to verify ID possession.
I've recently (last several years) started framing my use/consideration of services and products as a dependency. I find myself arriving at "I'd rather go without than depend on xyz" quite often.
yeah it needs to be robust enough to keep a trail so it can detect leaks and predict, and perhaps eventually identify vpn nodes, like Reddit will often block my request when I’m on VPN so there may be a way to smartly disregard certain requests from being counted as the true location, this seems really complicated the more I think about it though
In the old days 'where it was posted from' used to be displayed on tweets, and Elon intentionally changed it to 'Earth'. Interesting to see a backpedal here, albeit concealed.
If you had access to the twitter feed (and I did at one point, as our company got the firehose from Twitter), it showed the Lat/Long of where it was posted from IIRC.
I still remember looking at that tweet when the helos went in for OBL, from someone in Abottabad PK, saying something like "helicopters hovering at 2AM... this is a rare occurrence" (or something like that).
It's still there, they just stopped showing it in the UI. If you poke about in the React state of the Twitter UI, you can see it in the `tweets` entity cache (everything else is still Twitter under the hood too).
It’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.
There was that whole Russian operation paying blogs, influencers and other alt-media personalities in the run up to the election that was investigated. Nothing came of it and no one cared. I lost all faith in anyone being reasonable at that point. People want to hear what they want to hear, you can tell about how it's a psyops all you want, they still don't care.
>It’s widely known and reported this is happening.
I am not sure it's "widely known and reported" that the official Twitter account for the Department of Homeland Security was created in, and is run from, Israel.
Head of Product at X also changed narratives in real-time, going from "this was never shown" for gray accounts like the DHS', to saying the feature was disabled due to incorrect information from IP ranges changing over time - when you're literally just checking their first IP check-in:
And there was, to everyone's credit, DOZENS of X threads of people torture-testing their browser recordings to confirm whether the information was legit or not:
Maybe THAT screenshot was, but it's not looking good that the information in that screenshot (doctored or not) wasn't exposed.
Also fotoforensics is irrelevant, take a screenshot of an X account's information and you see those black bars. Why would they doctor the "@DHSgov" username otherwise lol?
The same head of product quoted in the sib comment admits that "for a small set of accounts the location data was incorrect". Given what we know about Twitter's relationship with the government and this administration in particular, you're simply left to do with that information what you will.
I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much. I also would not be surprised if some government accounts were created at various embassies around the world or through strategic VPN networks, or if general business is conducted through a darknet-like node system which includes allied endpoints. To me those are more plausible.
after it was reported/recorded, X "fixed" it by making .gov accounts untrackable. So now it doesnt show Israel anymore (and MAGA accounts now have an opportunity to scream fake news)
> This is fake news. Location was not available on any gray check account at any point. Furthermore, the DHS has only shown IPs from the United States since account creation.
- head of product @x
Not to discount the impact of foreign powers over social media but maybe don't spread this misinformation.
Does this make the fact that it showed as Israel, was disabled, and is now "corrected", mean that this feature is good or bad?
Either we can trust all location data all the time, or we can trust none of it. We cannot expect Nikita Bier to swoop in on every suspicious tweet and try to educate us on IP range changes and DNS glitches or whatever.
Furthermore is it more likely that a small set of special accounts seemingly never collected location data on signup, or that for a small number of accounts X simply modified that data post-hoc?
It may have happened. There are already many users saying their "created in" locations were incorrect. Thus the rest of my comment: trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct.
It's been known for a while this is just verification. Accounts give themselves away all the time accidentally through phrases or tells. eg: A tweet from an account claiming to be from the US talking about Texas succession that mentions 'warm water ports', very few people care or think about that because all the ports on the continental US don't freeze over in the winter. (In fact very few countries do because most have as many warm water ports as they need, one of the few with significant issues with this is... Russia)
No one likes to be the bad messenger saying to Americans that they were fooled and all that hatred against their opponents (opposite party) was actually induced, not born out of their own superiority.
It doesn't violate any rules as far as I can tell. Why do certain topics get predictably flagged when they don't breach any rules? I don't know, that's a good question for the admins
Govs doing influence campaigns was admitted during the twitter files [1]. While it's the US-relationship, Twitter is a global company so they're going to have other country relationships.
First, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before, it was just a PR campaign for Musk to try to lessen trust among the populace.
Second, this is about foreign influence driving a lot of the self-destructive politics in the US. Right now the US is going through economic and political destruction a lot like Brexit, and it should be no surprise that it's being lead by those outside of the US who want to make the US weaker.
> First, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before
My guy, there's like 40 words between my post and the source try reading them. They were doing influence campaigns ...
> [1] documents that showed the Twitter Site Integrity Team whitelisted accounts from United States Central Command (CENTCOM) used to run online influence campaigns in other countries
How drunk on American exceptionalism are you that you can't think if the US does something then somebody else does too?
Why would twitter need to whitelist US influence campaigns? Because they're banning foreign ones! Reading between the lines is going to be a very useful skill in your career; don't just take things at face value, exaime what the thing means for its surroundings.
I find it curious that the "Twitter Files" were never actually made available anywhere. Anyhow, I checked your link, and the source for your statement, is simply an article containing another statement, namely this:
> “The same day CENTCOM sent the list, Twitter officials used a tool to grant a special “whitelist” tag that essentially provides verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags,” Fang said.
I'd be interested in reading the "Twitter Files" corroborating this. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I am definitely saying the files would be incredibly easy to defend were they simply released for public consumption and not slowly filtered out over time in short tweets by a few reporters selected by Elon Musk.
I doubt most of this is foreign government influence campaigns. I think it's more that Twitter will pay you to post clickbait, and if you are in Africa or many parts of Asia the amount you can earn is significant.
There was some great reporting about Macedonian teenagers doing this kind of thing back in 2016 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma... - it was actually the origin of the term "fake news" before Trump redefined it to mean any mainstream media coverage that he didn't like.
The Twitter Files has to be one of the most direct tells for idiocy that humans have invented. It's almost on the same level as the Mueller Report for right wing clowns with zero understanding of the world pointing to it as if it's some sort of proof. Meanwhile, anyone with any literacy can actually read the reports and find they state the opposite of what conservatives often claim. Unfortunately illiteracy rates are at incredible highs right now and it shows everywhere, including hackernews.
this isn't surprising. as the article mentions, this has been going on since at least 2016. You can expect influence campaigns to be on every social network and comment section.
The problem is that these companies do nothing about this.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. Ever since Trump first silenced critics by abusing the authority of his office (or threatening to do so), it is painfully obvious how many large media houses shy away from all-too-blatant reporting.
So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.
We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample. It may be individual profiteers. It could be one, or multiple, coördinated campaigns. X may be complicit or clueless.
I’d be surprised if serious journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to need to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.
(That said, the premise is incorrect. In limited cases, it’s gaining traction [1].)
We've known of foreign influence campaigns targeting Americans on social media for a long time. A significant number of HN users have a vested interest in pretending it isn't the case. Some of them are making money off it. Others are too proud to entertain the notion that they might be the gullible victims of rage-bait and disinformation. Posts on the subject usually gets flagged pretty quick, but it's getting harder to ignore the truth.
No surprise to us geeks, of course. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" and all that.
The big surprise (disappointment) to me was witnessing how "do your own research" looks in practice.
- Type in some search terms.
- Open handful of the top hits.
- Believe everything.
- Even the obvious scams & ads.
There's something about media that bypasses most adult's innate skepticism. Like if I told some stranger (IRL) that saffron cures baldness, they'd be all GTFO. But hear it from a talk show host or read it on Facebook, well shit, it must be true.
It was widely reported that right wing influencers were being directly paid by Russia for their disinformation. People like Tim Poole were demonstrated to be on the Russian payroll but nothing ever came from it because conservatives don't care. They have no real values or beliefs other than winning and making people they don't like suffer. The "moderates" are too busy trying to decide what the right compromise between fascism and freedom are. The liberals are too busy trying to find their next way to punch left while platforming fascists as allies.
Most of this, to some degree, has been well established for a while.
American Republicans have relied heavily on foreign interference to achieve their goals. From social media manipulation to laundering illegal political bribes, Republicans have been doing it.
If people are concerned about foreign interference, it’s worth noting that Twitter’s ID-verification pipeline runs through AU10TIX. The company is founded in Tel aviv by an ex Israeli military person and maintains core operations and engineering in Israel, which is where part of the verification flow is processed. That creates a direct data-flow path for sensitive government IDs outside the U.S. for no real reason, and most users have no idea this is happening. I do not want a foreign government to have access to the address of all American verified users on Twitter.
You'll need to be more specific. Every adult in Israel is ex-military since they have a mandatory draft. The exception is draft dodgers. FWIW, notably orthodox Jews are among those.
Mandatory service isn’t the point. The issue is that a foreign jurisdiction with a tight intelligence industry overlap is processing U.S. government IDs. especially for something like X/Twitter where verified accounts include journalists, activists, and government officials. There are many alternatives located in the US.
If that isn't the point, why mention they are ex-military? Mentioning they're located in Israel ('foreign jurisdiction with a tight intelligence industry overlap') would suffice.
aaaand this is why you should be extremely wary if a company is asking you to upload sensitive information. Even if it's a big company.
I tried to tour an apartment complex, and they required me to use an online application for 'id verification. For a tour. A tour!
I'm sorry, but you do not require my social security number and pictures of my driver's license for me to use my eyeballs to see an apartment unit. What am I gonna do? Drive away with the apartment?
Musk's affiliation is power and whomever will give him more money. This is a tactic he has revealed. Don't go along with him? He will expose your propaganda network. Or maybe he will enable a way to change it for money. Musk isn't loyal to anyone but himself.
Seeing how reddit is moving in the opposite direction by doing things like allowing people to hide their submission histories, that seems highly unlikely.
VPN farms and using remote servers are all with a bit of effort detectable. It starts a new arms race but all it takes is to catch the account misplaced once on a change to then keep that history and expose the discrepancy forever. Its going to be quite difficult to get and maintain a genuine domestic IP that is unique per account and doesn't then get shut down often.
Interestingly enough, Twitter is excellent at that. Maybe they even jump the gun.
Ever since I noticed that when you register a decent domain, someone will instantly register a Twitter account with that name, I have started trying to preempt that.
I accidentally clicked a Twitter link the other day, while apparently still logged in to an account. I was on a VPN at that moment. Instant suspension within 15 seconds. It was astonishing.
No it’s definitely more important that foreign countries are manipulating American politics through social media than people in poor countries are making money off of rage bait (and likely many of the latter are being paid by the former).
This will fundamentally change nothing. The vast majority of people that care, already know. The others don't care.
Also anyone that is taking any meaningful information from Twitter likely isn't really fussed about the details - they're after whoever is there is support their view.
I believe these MAGA accounts were being operated not for a political agenda, but simply as a means for people in developing countries to make money. MAGA content is genuinely easy to spread across social media platforms like X and YouTube, which is why it's so easy to rack up views.
This is mostly why I stopped going on Reddit. At least on X I have more control over what I see and mostly just follow trustworthy accounts. I just assume most of the commentary on mainstream American subreddits like politics is infiltrated by foreign actors and bots.
I left because I couldn't stand the echo-chamber and hivemind attitudes. There's also way too many people arguing just for the sake of arguing, even though they agree with your overall comments. It was slightly more manageable when you just stuck to very niche sub-reddits like gardening, landscaping, cozyplaces, sub for tv-shows etc. Now it's nothing but bots and AI garbage. The platform is beyond saving.
So obviously this is big if true, but do we know it isn’t just that a lot of high profile type people on social media use VPNs? If I was a public figure or attempting to be one or anything like that I would definitely try to hide where I am actually located, regardless of whether I am doing anything nefarious, just because political harassment and violence is a thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these accounts are psyops, but the majority are probably just grifters exploiting X's revenue sharing system. We've already seen that play out on Facebook where users in developing countries would spam low-effort, high-engagement content to make money. That might mean posting political rage-bait or producing AI-generated Shrimp Jesus pictures (amen), it's just down to whatever gets the clicks this week.
In any case, it's manufacturing immoral and violent sentiment to the detriment of society. Why should we allow such things to percolate? What benefit is this providing to society?
There's no benefit to society, but revshare abuse differs in that it's self-inflicted by the platforms. They can make it go away by not rewarding that behaviour.
Why not both? Psyops that cover their own costs sound pretty neat! Just imagine... your target country is so sloppy and greedy that it monetizes its own destruction.
I believe one of the top three most murderous tyrants of the previous century had a quote about this very thing!
To be or not to be, xenophobic and America first? Perhaps we should blame this on Big VPN? Or is this more 20-minute city geo-fencing technology pushing? All sorts of fun ways to spin this one.
This is directly from the Russian Война нового поколения (New Generation Warfare)[0] playbook.
> new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, ... morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population
Any kind of discord is good for Russia, every single panic and outrage that splits the population is good, even better when you get people to doubt "the media" in general.
It isn't bigger news because it would expose many of the targets they like to throw things at (eg Groypers) are not American, but foreign agents masquerading as such.
It definitely could be foreign influence. It also could be US companies/campaigns (same thing...) outsourcing their astroturfing to other countries to save money.
Remember when Musk’s entire cause celebre was to expose the bot networks and paid trolls on Twitter and then he dropped all of that bluster when he realized how useful they’d be to his political goals?
This also was an individual who was getting very little sleep, taking an unknown assortment of hallucinogenic psychotropics, who clearly got drunk off his own success and the attention he got, possibly psyop'd by multiple governments due to his reach and influence.
It's kind of tragic. He reminds me of Smeagol from Lord of the Rings. People lacking any virtue (like wisdom, compassion, or courage) are extremely vulnerable to external dark forces.
Then why is he allowing it to be exposed right now? If actually useful to his political goals, he would suppress the launch of the location feature, right?
It was useful to his political goals back in 2023/2024 when he was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump elected - it seems like he doesn’t think they’re still useful today.
They’re probably also such a large part of the active Twitter “user base” that substantially reigning them in would be enough to put the product into a permanent, sharp decline.
While I don't agree with him doing that, he's doing it above board and in his own name. That's different from foreign actors doing it incognito under covered identities.
Wild reading the news earlier to see Iran is making a concerted effort to influence Scottish Independence.
Is the idea to weaken the UK? To what end?
Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back? The CIA and MI6 are no stranger to destabilising regimes, and yet surely it would be more common knowledge if we were employing people to post anti-Putin propaganda on Russian forums?
Iran is very much an ally of Russia. The theory I have seen for Moscow wanting Scottish independence is that they might remove the UK's only nuclear sub port from their newly independent country.
Also, it would be a general black eye for the UK, which has been very supportive of the defense of Ukraine.
That sounds like the blundering VP/president in The Diplomat. I wonder if it's instead North Sea Oil, and Iran preferring a UK with less energy independence.
Why wouldn't an independent Scotland continue producing oil from the North Sea? It's one of the main talking points for independence: "we get to keep that money."
BTW, I had not seen that show, but if they are getting things even close to accurate once in a blue moon, then I may do so. Thanks.
If we are to take our natural place as the inventors and leaders of "The West," you know... democracy and all that boring stuff... wouldn't it be nice to have a source that is within reach, until we ween ourselves off of fossil fuels?
Another answer: with sanctions on Russian oil, and hopefully finally waking up to the fact that we cannot rely on any traditional foreign partners... yes.
Look at what China has done. They know they have no reliable sources and delivery routes for liquid fossil fuels. So, they took the reigns of their own destiny and created PV and battery production on a scale that changed the world.
Meanwhile, we in the EU, let Northvolt go under, and we closed down domestic PV production... like babes in the woods. (children wandering the the forest full of wolves)
Letting Northvolt shut down was one of the dumbest strategic things in modern European history, and that is saying a lot. I still have hope that it can somehow be resurrected.
"We" implies that the entire EU would have to be ready to support an expensive project. Surely Scotland cannot do it alone.
The question is whether this makes sense when Norway produces cheaper hydrocarbons just next door. The production sites there are every bit as vulnerable to Russian attacks as those next to Scotland.
I am curious, what do you think of the concept of European Federalism, to some extent?
It seems completely impossible, and yet somewhat inevitable. As I write this, I am sitting just a 30 minute drive into Silesia from the CZ border. In my car I receive PL, CZ, and DE radio stations.
The first I heard of the concept of a Federalized EU, it was from very excited international younger folks in Prague.
Probably but it's also more complicated than such a simplistic analysis. I think they want to jam the communications in general. Make big problems seem small. Make small problems seem big. Make people suspect legitimate debaters of being trolls.
Twitter pays more for US impressions so slop accounts often target a US audience and the payments are relatively more attractive to people in less developed countries. Aside from the fact that Americans are only 4% of the world population. What about this is surprising?
There is no evidence presented that there is any state sponsored conspiracy going on. Nor would you need one to explain what we're seeing.
The author also presents no evidence that Pro-Trump accounts are disproportionately represented among accounts lying about their country of residence.
Ultimately, this is just evidence-free gesturing at some grand conspiracy. Cherrypicking the bits that are red meat to her (and apparently HN's) audience.
So... Is Musk really trying to say he didn't know this before election? This has to be investigated, as it has implications far beyond Musk. This is basically a global scandal.
The scandal is he most likely knew the election is being manipulated via his platform, but didn’t say anything, because it was in “his” candidate’s favor.
At this point, does it not make sense that Israel just become an additional US State or Territory? At least that way they can be taxed, regulated and controlled like any other US territory. If we are committed to providing absolute protection for them like we would a state, they should just become part of the US. Their existing government structures should be absorbed into the US and all their citizens be made US citizens and subject to tax and rule of the law of the US.
To be honest, I'm not sure it is a 'covert influence network'.. Or at least, that is a much more conspiratorial turn of phrase than I would use here.
It strikes me as wage arbitrage if anything, an opportunity for these engagement farmers to make very good money (relatively), an opportunity which was all-but-explicitly created by Elon Musk's payout system.
All else aside, its very funny that this is an example of a market-maker once again (un)intentionally destabilizing the social fabric they talk so much about.
4chan’s /pol/ has had the flag forever, and “show flag” is a typical callout.
Only the normies are surprised and the pearl clutching on HN is farcical. You should know better by now.
I guess the outrage must be manufactured so let’s all join hands and pretend we are shocked by this news and demand something be done, I guess. Slow news week.
It's not just Americans that are being targeted. If you look at prominent far-right pseudo-influencers (i.e. identities not tied to a real living person) in Germany, the result is just the same. Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa - not Germany.
Or it's everyone being targeted by scammers posing as Gazans - these scammers are, for me, the vilest of the vile. No matter which team one is on regarding this particular conflict... abusing the dire situation in which many Gazans legitimately are to grift money is outright wrong.
We need to hold Russia and China, the most likely actors pulling the strings, accountable. No more niceties, no more playing with the big guys, until this kind of warfare stops. And so we should treat every country hosting the low-level agents. Clean shop or get hammered. I'm sick and tired of cyber crime, propaganda warfare and scamming our elderly. Enough is enough.
As the article mentions a lot of the accounts probably just using VPN services. Remember when Elon exposed the US government in cahoots with Meta and Twitter actively shadow banning people for free speech on legitimate topics such as covid, covid vaccines, masks, and the woke agenda?
The "Twitter Files" absolutely did not expose anything like that, despite what Lord Genius Elon tried to imply. At best it exposed internal discussion and policies that may have suppressed posts related to Covid, but showed that the Biden administration was largely (largely doesn't mean never) uninvolved with that. It seems like the most they asked was in regards to the "Hunter Biden Laptop" issue and that was largely with posts that were showing the nudes of the women that he was sleeping with, not even posts that were just nude Hunter.
Elon then turned on Matt Taibbi and banned him from Twitter when he wouldn't go along with his lying and spin.
>likely the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since the revelations about Russia in 2016
the 2016 "revelations" were a nothing-burger, ginned up as cover for the actual dangerous conspiracy, to spy on a rival political campaign in a scandal that eclipses Watergate.
Right, and the outcome changes little that wasn't already known.
The interesting part of this story is why was this switched on now, by whom? Why was it briefly turned off? Was that an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle?
Is there anyone left who's falling for the idea of symmetry of scope on what's going on? It reads like the most transparent attempt at diversion and denial.
Further evidence that a national firewall is a prudent idea. What kind of careless government would permit anyone in the world to have unfettered, anonymous access to their citizens' thoughts and minds?
Green account with a low-effort sarcastic comment. Worthy not only of downvotes, but public derision.
Do you have any desire, or idea, on how to curb cyber-agitprop from enemy nations? Is living in a world with rampant, effective, agitprop on the internet with zero reaction the least of all evils?
It's a fair question. No, no desire to curb anything because of who is going to do the curbing. Any regulating entity (government or private) will use subjective judgement and will invariably devolve into censorship.
The concern of course is that humans as a crowd are dumb, but on the other hand I think you give individuals too little credit. A smart person won't get his/her political views from random X posts.
The problem is that most americans do not know first hand how the real censorship looks like. In the context of the previous discussion in that thread, chinese and russian firewalls block any discussion of gay rights issues. Do you think the US will be any different? We are all humans with the same deficiencies.
Any "firewall", however it is implemented, will be a double edged sword that will eventually start cutting one way, and you won't like the result.
To sum it up, yes, it's the least of all evils.
If you would like to deride the answer, I assure you I am quite immune to the effort.
Touched a nerve? I have quite a few gay and trans friends. They tend to agree with my views which is live and let live. Their lifestyle is not a problem, and they afford me the same courtesy.
Example of a neonazi who isn't white [1]. The Believer (2001, with Ryan Gosling) is a decent fictional movie about how this could work [2], and I also liked Rompen Stomper (1992, with Russell Crowe) [3] and La Haine (French for 'the hate', 1995, with Vincent Cassel) [4] about the phenomenon in general but there's likely more recent, good material as well as non-fiction available. I also had a colleague student who was IMO racist, but he was himself what we in NL call halfbloedje (in this case: mother black, father white, divorced).
The specific example I cited was the "we are coming for your children" chant in NYC, which is way beyond demanding to "live and let live". Things like this give an insane amount of ammunition to the anti-gay movement. You are lying by twisting my words, thankfully, the posting history is all there for everyone to see.
I always supported equal rights and dialogue, and voted accordingly. That's why I do have problems with militant individuals like youself that create a complete mockery of the issue by refusing to think, resorting to insults, eating their own and actually causing the real harm to any rights movement. Who would want to be in the same voting block with someone who seems to be off the rails?
Of course you will next say that you don't believe me and will pull more proof from wiki, but I don't give a flying duck. Bye.
Until we see the source code for how X is determining the geo-location, all bets are off.
This could just as easily be X, trying to influence opinions on the nature of America's divisive classes, which is to say there is just as much evidence that is the case as any other circumstances one might conclude.
Exactly. Using Twitter as a primary source for this is dubious. Already seen a few accounts prove that they are where they say they are even though X shows them as being half way across the world.
Following occams razor, I think they released a broken feature and have taken it down since then to fix it. Which leads all these "revelations" to be based on incomplete or false data. Not to say the site isn't filled with bots and influence campaigns, it absolutely is. But basing that conclusion on this location information is foolish.
Unfortunately, it requires 3 clicks ("account" -> "join date" -> "about account") to get the required information.
It should be visible on the post itself: where it was posted from, and where the author's account is mostly located. Just 2 little chips stuck on top of each and every post.
It wouldn't be difficult to include a little "" icon on each post that, when hovered, shows probable location or the creation origin. It's true that VPN's will often muddy this info, and even things like phone number confirmation for 2FA or billing address for Verified badges can't be 100% reliable... but it shouldn't be too difficult to say in those cases "User likely masking location" if the pattern is detected.
It's not about being easy it is about being profitable. I don't care where you fall politically, accounts like this increase engagement and thus profit. Companies like profit so this type of thing despite being much easier than some might assert is going to be slow to do. You can have legal requirements around identification for accounts over 2K followers. It basically would never inconvience people unless they are trying to be an influencer
The largest effect is that X suddenly (out of nowhere?) started to mention this, publicly. Which, given mr. Musk's political stance (who himself has been the target of a campaign, likely from mr. Putin), wasn't intended to have this effect.
If you were to share this information publicly from the start, the troll/propagandist/agent would know this information is being shared as-is from the start, and they could adapt. Very likely they would adapt. Therefore, the effect would be much less severe.
It is also very obviously PII, which would hurt innocent people (likely a minority but I can imagine it happening).
My take: intelligence agencies were already interested in said information and mr. Musk was like "whatever, we'll just share this with everyone".
This is exactly what happened.
I mean, it is just my theory. I don't have a source to back it up.
Yes, X is the new /pol.
How many of these accounts are Russian? I bet hardly any. My money is mostly from a small country in the middle east.
How much money are we talking?
russians been interfering with other countries through all possible channels for decades.
They integrated with every single Ukrainian election (including the most recent one in 2019), they tried hijacking (with various success) elections in Romania, Moldova, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Estonia, etc..
This includes radio, tv, printed periodics, social networks, even popular music, movies, tv series and books...
So how much are you willing to bet that this time it's definitely not russians?
Followed immediately by these groups making VPNs a standard part of their toolkit. This data is enlightening but its reveal doesn't solve the problem.
Twitter can require verification on their end or require ID upload or something along those lines. The social media companies can solve this problem, it’s just way too profitable to not. They make a lot of money when you read about non-existent events from an account curated in China or India or Belarus and then go look at a bunch of ads for Patriot Bars (R) or Rainbow socks (L) or whatever.
They could by default for example require an identification of some sort, and then allow “non-ID” accounts to exist but require specific opt-in to view broadly or something along those lines.
More easily though you can just delete your account and then you don’t have to care about any of this crap.
There's already pretty sophisticated setups to get fake live ID verifications where it's already a cat and mouse game between the tools to verify and the tools faking live verifications (sometimes including just scamming people into acting as the 'user' for verification). Ideally I'd also not have to provide my ID for yet another inane service and risk that ID getting leaked as seems to be inevitable.
Yea that’s fair. I guess the easy/best solution is to just not use the product in that case.
But I’d be in favor of even an in-person verification system though the costs to do that would be unpalatable but I guess you could stand up a 3rd party to do that. Maybe there are better solutions out there that I’m not thinking of. I do know it’s very much against what the larger social media companies would want though because they actively want you to be outraged and misinformed since they make a lot of money off of that.
I wish they had included it as part of the RealID system. It would have been pretty easy to make them smart cards that could use simple public private key tech to verify IDs. Private keys go into the cards and public keys get registered with the state agency issuing the IDs. It's not perfect but it'd at least be a pseudonymous way to verify ID possession.
I've recently (last several years) started framing my use/consideration of services and products as a dependency. I find myself arriving at "I'd rather go without than depend on xyz" quite often.
Twitter reveals when it thinks users are using a VPN and tries to guess the origin location regardless, though with quite low accuracy
It seems like they are using a more sophisticated way to determine location (App Store download county, etc) not just IP.
yeah it needs to be robust enough to keep a trail so it can detect leaks and predict, and perhaps eventually identify vpn nodes, like Reddit will often block my request when I’m on VPN so there may be a way to smartly disregard certain requests from being counted as the true location, this seems really complicated the more I think about it though
I built a little Chrome extension that shows the flag for where the account is based in on the profile page itself: https://grokify.app.
I'm thinking of adding it next to the Tweet source when you focus a Tweet:
https://twitter.com/ControlPanelFT/status/199301008332080747...
they really should. i thought they'd have a flag on the actual profile.
In the old days 'where it was posted from' used to be displayed on tweets, and Elon intentionally changed it to 'Earth'. Interesting to see a backpedal here, albeit concealed.
This is incorrect.
The old Twitter and its API had "source" field which showed the client app a tweet was sent from.
{ "created_at": "Mon Nov 20 12:34:56 +0000 2023", "id_str": "1726578932412345678", "full_text": "Example tweet", "source": "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/download/iphone\" rel=\"nofollow\">Twitter for iPhone</a>", ... }
If you had access to the twitter feed (and I did at one point, as our company got the firehose from Twitter), it showed the Lat/Long of where it was posted from IIRC.
I still remember looking at that tweet when the helos went in for OBL, from someone in Abottabad PK, saying something like "helicopters hovering at 2AM... this is a rare occurrence" (or something like that).
You can still opt in today to tag your location in a post, that never changed.
It's still there, they just stopped showing it in the UI. If you poke about in the React state of the Twitter UI, you can see it in the `tweets` entity cache (everything else is still Twitter under the hood too).
Didn't that show the client the user posted from, not their location? Which was mostly useless anyway after they all but killed the API.
Absolutely wild that this isn't bigger news. This should be the front page of every major news network.
It’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.
There was that whole Russian operation paying blogs, influencers and other alt-media personalities in the run up to the election that was investigated. Nothing came of it and no one cared. I lost all faith in anyone being reasonable at that point. People want to hear what they want to hear, you can tell about how it's a psyops all you want, they still don't care.
>It’s widely known and reported this is happening.
I am not sure it's "widely known and reported" that the official Twitter account for the Department of Homeland Security was created in, and is run from, Israel.
Given the sibling comment here, I am wondering if you’ve fallen for a fake screenshot. I hope you did not make this up.
Yeah that DHS screenshot is fake. If you boost the exposure there's conspicuous gaps in the JPEG artifacts around the fields where they were edited.
They would have got away with it if they just used Inspect Element!
Are you sure?
https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1992314672436175055
---
Head of Product at X also changed narratives in real-time, going from "this was never shown" for gray accounts like the DHS', to saying the feature was disabled due to incorrect information from IP ranges changing over time - when you're literally just checking their first IP check-in:
https://x.com/lporiginalg/status/1992385445024665655
---
And there was, to everyone's credit, DOZENS of X threads of people torture-testing their browser recordings to confirm whether the information was legit or not:
https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/1992331293212963080
---
Make your own decisions, but that's what I took from the situation.
> Are you sure?
I'm sure that the screenshot going around shows signs of being edited, I checked that myself. For the rest, I have no idea.
https://postimg.cc/gngQL6BY
Maybe THAT screenshot was, but it's not looking good that the information in that screenshot (doctored or not) wasn't exposed.
Also fotoforensics is irrelevant, take a screenshot of an X account's information and you see those black bars. Why would they doctor the "@DHSgov" username otherwise lol?
The same head of product quoted in the sib comment admits that "for a small set of accounts the location data was incorrect". Given what we know about Twitter's relationship with the government and this administration in particular, you're simply left to do with that information what you will.
I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much. I also would not be surprised if some government accounts were created at various embassies around the world or through strategic VPN networks, or if general business is conducted through a darknet-like node system which includes allied endpoints. To me those are more plausible.
> I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much
Then don’t conclude—much less spread as “known”—foreign interference from Twitter/X’s purported location data about the government.
after it was reported/recorded, X "fixed" it by making .gov accounts untrackable. So now it doesnt show Israel anymore (and MAGA accounts now have an opportunity to scream fake news)
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743?s=20
> This is fake news. Location was not available on any gray check account at any point. Furthermore, the DHS has only shown IPs from the United States since account creation.
- head of product @x
Not to discount the impact of foreign powers over social media but maybe don't spread this misinformation.
Does this make the fact that it showed as Israel, was disabled, and is now "corrected", mean that this feature is good or bad?
Either we can trust all location data all the time, or we can trust none of it. We cannot expect Nikita Bier to swoop in on every suspicious tweet and try to educate us on IP range changes and DNS glitches or whatever.
Furthermore is it more likely that a small set of special accounts seemingly never collected location data on signup, or that for a small number of accounts X simply modified that data post-hoc?
> the fact that it showed as Israel
Please re-read. That never happened.
It may have happened. There are already many users saying their "created in" locations were incorrect. Thus the rest of my comment: trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct.
> trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct
You’re mixing up trust and faith.
Blink twice if you are in danger.
It's been known for a while this is just verification. Accounts give themselves away all the time accidentally through phrases or tells. eg: A tweet from an account claiming to be from the US talking about Texas succession that mentions 'warm water ports', very few people care or think about that because all the ports on the continental US don't freeze over in the winter. (In fact very few countries do because most have as many warm water ports as they need, one of the few with significant issues with this is... Russia)
No one likes to be the bad messenger saying to Americans that they were fooled and all that hatred against their opponents (opposite party) was actually induced, not born out of their own superiority.
It’s going to get flagged off of HN front page within the hour like it did the last two times someone posted about it
It already disappeared from front page. Your comment was 45 minutes old when I was writing this.
Why, does it breach any rules?
No, people use flagging when it disagrees with their political perspective. They show up on the post to say so, too.
It doesn't violate any rules as far as I can tell. Why do certain topics get predictably flagged when they don't breach any rules? I don't know, that's a good question for the admins
Tall tale signs of a foreign influence campaign cover up, watch your 6
Why?
Govs doing influence campaigns was admitted during the twitter files [1]. While it's the US-relationship, Twitter is a global company so they're going to have other country relationships.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._8%E2%80%939...
First, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before, it was just a PR campaign for Musk to try to lessen trust among the populace.
Second, this is about foreign influence driving a lot of the self-destructive politics in the US. Right now the US is going through economic and political destruction a lot like Brexit, and it should be no surprise that it's being lead by those outside of the US who want to make the US weaker.
> First, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before
My guy, there's like 40 words between my post and the source try reading them. They were doing influence campaigns ...
> [1] documents that showed the Twitter Site Integrity Team whitelisted accounts from United States Central Command (CENTCOM) used to run online influence campaigns in other countries
How does that relate to covert influence networks targeting the US?
How drunk on American exceptionalism are you that you can't think if the US does something then somebody else does too?
Why would twitter need to whitelist US influence campaigns? Because they're banning foreign ones! Reading between the lines is going to be a very useful skill in your career; don't just take things at face value, exaime what the thing means for its surroundings.
I find it curious that the "Twitter Files" were never actually made available anywhere. Anyhow, I checked your link, and the source for your statement, is simply an article containing another statement, namely this:
> “The same day CENTCOM sent the list, Twitter officials used a tool to grant a special “whitelist” tag that essentially provides verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags,” Fang said.
I'd be interested in reading the "Twitter Files" corroborating this. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I am definitely saying the files would be incredibly easy to defend were they simply released for public consumption and not slowly filtered out over time in short tweets by a few reporters selected by Elon Musk.
Is this an unfair take?
I doubt most of this is foreign government influence campaigns. I think it's more that Twitter will pay you to post clickbait, and if you are in Africa or many parts of Asia the amount you can earn is significant.
There was some great reporting about Macedonian teenagers doing this kind of thing back in 2016 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma... - it was actually the origin of the term "fake news" before Trump redefined it to mean any mainstream media coverage that he didn't like.
The Twitter Files has to be one of the most direct tells for idiocy that humans have invented. It's almost on the same level as the Mueller Report for right wing clowns with zero understanding of the world pointing to it as if it's some sort of proof. Meanwhile, anyone with any literacy can actually read the reports and find they state the opposite of what conservatives often claim. Unfortunately illiteracy rates are at incredible highs right now and it shows everywhere, including hackernews.
Trump: The Mueller report exonerates me.
Mueller Report: “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
this isn't surprising. as the article mentions, this has been going on since at least 2016. You can expect influence campaigns to be on every social network and comment section.
The problem is that these companies do nothing about this.
They (major news networks) are owned by Trump friendlies (Bezos/WaPo, Soon-Shiong/LAT, etc.) or they are afraid of Trump’s influence.
If MAGA does not care, Trump won't care either, and I cannot imagine MAGA caring.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. Ever since Trump first silenced critics by abusing the authority of his office (or threatening to do so), it is painfully obvious how many large media houses shy away from all-too-blatant reporting.
Musk's like a transparent kid these days. Anything he touches seem to disappear from media - there is such thing as bad publicity after all, I guess.
I mean it's been pretty obvious for a while...
the people who would care already knew about this. the people who didn't know about this don't care (or are in denial).
> wild that this isn't bigger news
Give it time.
So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.
We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample. It may be individual profiteers. It could be one, or multiple, coördinated campaigns. X may be complicit or clueless.
I’d be surprised if serious journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to need to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.
(That said, the premise is incorrect. In limited cases, it’s gaining traction [1].)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-...
Hard to compete with leaders being accused of raping, corruption, and and calling for execution of political opponents for newsworthiness.
We've known of foreign influence campaigns targeting Americans on social media for a long time. A significant number of HN users have a vested interest in pretending it isn't the case. Some of them are making money off it. Others are too proud to entertain the notion that they might be the gullible victims of rage-bait and disinformation. Posts on the subject usually gets flagged pretty quick, but it's getting harder to ignore the truth.
That people from third world countries are making slop political accounts to make money? Hardly a news story at all
No surprise to us geeks, of course. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" and all that.
The big surprise (disappointment) to me was witnessing how "do your own research" looks in practice.
There's something about media that bypasses most adult's innate skepticism. Like if I told some stranger (IRL) that saffron cures baldness, they'd be all GTFO. But hear it from a talk show host or read it on Facebook, well shit, it must be true.It was widely reported that right wing influencers were being directly paid by Russia for their disinformation. People like Tim Poole were demonstrated to be on the Russian payroll but nothing ever came from it because conservatives don't care. They have no real values or beliefs other than winning and making people they don't like suffer. The "moderates" are too busy trying to decide what the right compromise between fascism and freedom are. The liberals are too busy trying to find their next way to punch left while platforming fascists as allies.
Most of this, to some degree, has been well established for a while.
American Republicans have relied heavily on foreign interference to achieve their goals. From social media manipulation to laundering illegal political bribes, Republicans have been doing it.
100%, but the clear proof afforded by Elon should be the opportunity to really put it out there.
If people are concerned about foreign interference, it’s worth noting that Twitter’s ID-verification pipeline runs through AU10TIX. The company is founded in Tel aviv by an ex Israeli military person and maintains core operations and engineering in Israel, which is where part of the verification flow is processed. That creates a direct data-flow path for sensitive government IDs outside the U.S. for no real reason, and most users have no idea this is happening. I do not want a foreign government to have access to the address of all American verified users on Twitter.
You'll need to be more specific. Every adult in Israel is ex-military since they have a mandatory draft. The exception is draft dodgers. FWIW, notably orthodox Jews are among those.
Mandatory service isn’t the point. The issue is that a foreign jurisdiction with a tight intelligence industry overlap is processing U.S. government IDs. especially for something like X/Twitter where verified accounts include journalists, activists, and government officials. There are many alternatives located in the US.
If that isn't the point, why mention they are ex-military? Mentioning they're located in Israel ('foreign jurisdiction with a tight intelligence industry overlap') would suffice.
aaaand this is why you should be extremely wary if a company is asking you to upload sensitive information. Even if it's a big company.
I tried to tour an apartment complex, and they required me to use an online application for 'id verification. For a tour. A tour!
I'm sorry, but you do not require my social security number and pictures of my driver's license for me to use my eyeballs to see an apartment unit. What am I gonna do? Drive away with the apartment?
Why is the word “accidentally” used when this is a feature that was implemented with this particular reason in mind?
Because it gets clicks.
Given Musk's political affiliations, it seems unlikely that this was the intended outcome.
Musk's affiliation is power and whomever will give him more money. This is a tactic he has revealed. Don't go along with him? He will expose your propaganda network. Or maybe he will enable a way to change it for money. Musk isn't loyal to anyone but himself.
“Moving forward, we’ll likely see a re-examination of how much credence we give to social media as a barometer of public opinion.”
Who is “we?” Not the media in the US, I’d wager.
Not just America, I assume this is pretty common for most countries' political discourse on Twitter.
Reddit also needs to have a feature like this.
Here is one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/poland/comments/1p5cqcs/literally_e...
Seeing how reddit is moving in the opposite direction by doing things like allowing people to hide their submission histories, that seems highly unlikely.
If it becomes more common for a service to reveal the geography of a user, wouldn't these cyberwarfare farms stand up VPN servers?
This is certainly useful as a one-time reveal since the attackers didn't think this data would leak, but now can't they prepare better?
VPN farms and using remote servers are all with a bit of effort detectable. It starts a new arms race but all it takes is to catch the account misplaced once on a change to then keep that history and expose the discrepancy forever. Its going to be quite difficult to get and maintain a genuine domestic IP that is unique per account and doesn't then get shut down often.
Easy, you just ban all known vpn endpoints and cloud hosting provider IP ranges. 4chan figured all this out over a decade ago.
Interestingly enough, Twitter is excellent at that. Maybe they even jump the gun.
Ever since I noticed that when you register a decent domain, someone will instantly register a Twitter account with that name, I have started trying to preempt that.
I accidentally clicked a Twitter link the other day, while apparently still logged in to an account. I was on a VPN at that moment. Instant suspension within 15 seconds. It was astonishing.
The "scary foreign" parts of this seems to miss the forest for the trees.
Social media makes rage-baiting people into a lucrative career and opens it up to anyone with an internet connection.
No it’s definitely more important that foreign countries are manipulating American politics through social media than people in poor countries are making money off of rage bait (and likely many of the latter are being paid by the former).
This will fundamentally change nothing. The vast majority of people that care, already know. The others don't care.
Also anyone that is taking any meaningful information from Twitter likely isn't really fussed about the details - they're after whoever is there is support their view.
I believe these MAGA accounts were being operated not for a political agenda, but simply as a means for people in developing countries to make money. MAGA content is genuinely easy to spread across social media platforms like X and YouTube, which is why it's so easy to rack up views.
The attempts at controlling the narrative feel a lot more unsubtle since Musk took over.
I bet dollars to donuts that they are tipping the scale on stoking up tensions on UK users with things like migration and class division.
I only follow tech people on twitter, but if you looked at my FYP you'd think I was deeply interested in UK politics - which I am not!
https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_inter...
think you'll be surprised in what has been signed for on your behalf.
Yup. Not just x though. On insta Even a slight misstep and you’re up to your eyeballs in anti migrant content from the algo
I'd pay $100 dollars a year to block all social media posts from India, Pakistan and Malaysia.
Add Texas and I will make it an even 500.
This is mostly why I stopped going on Reddit. At least on X I have more control over what I see and mostly just follow trustworthy accounts. I just assume most of the commentary on mainstream American subreddits like politics is infiltrated by foreign actors and bots.
I left because I couldn't stand the echo-chamber and hivemind attitudes. There's also way too many people arguing just for the sake of arguing, even though they agree with your overall comments. It was slightly more manageable when you just stuck to very niche sub-reddits like gardening, landscaping, cozyplaces, sub for tv-shows etc. Now it's nothing but bots and AI garbage. The platform is beyond saving.
LMAO.
You've got a chance if you use Mastodon or Bluesky, but you don't have control of the X algorithm.
> you don't have control of the X algorithm
There is literally a timeline that only shows the feed of people you follow.
Does it show every post of every person you follow in chronological order?
Does it serve ads?
So obviously this is big if true, but do we know it isn’t just that a lot of high profile type people on social media use VPNs? If I was a public figure or attempting to be one or anything like that I would definitely try to hide where I am actually located, regardless of whether I am doing anything nefarious, just because political harassment and violence is a thing.
Why should I trust X to give correct based countries for accounts?
The people that work there have shown a willingness to leak information in the past.
Do we actually know that this is only targeting Americans? If I were a state actor who put this thing together, I would use it on everybody.
with one exception; someone in the US might not think about doing it in other countries
A bunch of the accounts are targeting British politics, but it would seem the Americans are more greatly affected.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these accounts are psyops, but the majority are probably just grifters exploiting X's revenue sharing system. We've already seen that play out on Facebook where users in developing countries would spam low-effort, high-engagement content to make money. That might mean posting political rage-bait or producing AI-generated Shrimp Jesus pictures (amen), it's just down to whatever gets the clicks this week.
In any case, it's manufacturing immoral and violent sentiment to the detriment of society. Why should we allow such things to percolate? What benefit is this providing to society?
Because you're not the morality police and speech isn't violence.
There's no benefit to society, but revshare abuse differs in that it's self-inflicted by the platforms. They can make it go away by not rewarding that behaviour.
Why not both? Psyops that cover their own costs sound pretty neat! Just imagine... your target country is so sloppy and greedy that it monetizes its own destruction.
I believe one of the top three most murderous tyrants of the previous century had a quote about this very thing!
To be or not to be, xenophobic and America first? Perhaps we should blame this on Big VPN? Or is this more 20-minute city geo-fencing technology pushing? All sorts of fun ways to spin this one.
It's not really "accidental. Exposing stuff like this is precisely why they rolled out the country of origin feature.
But that would be a narrative violation. X.com and Elon Musk can't possibly be portrayed doing anything positive or productive.
This is directly from the Russian Война нового поколения (New Generation Warfare)[0] playbook.
> new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, ... morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population
Any kind of discord is good for Russia, every single panic and outrage that splits the population is good, even better when you get people to doubt "the media" in general.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_generation_warfare
It isn't bigger news because it would expose many of the targets they like to throw things at (eg Groypers) are not American, but foreign agents masquerading as such.
Related:
X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028422
X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417
Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211
Reddit, HN, and Facebook all desperately need this information too.
It definitely could be foreign influence. It also could be US companies/campaigns (same thing...) outsourcing their astroturfing to other countries to save money.
Every other ad on the internet is for vpn services. Some work better than others.
From my pov, what a great change.
Anyone talking without specific location, it doesnt matter.
Anyone talking positively about something, it doesn't matter.
We now know more about those interacting in a negative way.
the social media companies have likely had this data for a decade and decided to sit on it, as our democracies implode
I guess the CTR for disinformation bot ads must be good?
How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?
Remember when Musk’s entire cause celebre was to expose the bot networks and paid trolls on Twitter and then he dropped all of that bluster when he realized how useful they’d be to his political goals?
This also was an individual who was getting very little sleep, taking an unknown assortment of hallucinogenic psychotropics, who clearly got drunk off his own success and the attention he got, possibly psyop'd by multiple governments due to his reach and influence.
It's kind of tragic. He reminds me of Smeagol from Lord of the Rings. People lacking any virtue (like wisdom, compassion, or courage) are extremely vulnerable to external dark forces.
Then why is he allowing it to be exposed right now? If actually useful to his political goals, he would suppress the launch of the location feature, right?
If your bot farm happens to be domestic, exposing all the foreign bot-farms competing for the same audience seems like a no brainer.
Haven't they turned the feature off again already? (I don't have a twitter account, so I can't check)
It was useful to his political goals back in 2023/2024 when he was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump elected - it seems like he doesn’t think they’re still useful today.
They’re probably also such a large part of the active Twitter “user base” that substantially reigning them in would be enough to put the product into a permanent, sharp decline.
While I don't agree with him doing that, he's doing it above board and in his own name. That's different from foreign actors doing it incognito under covered identities.
Elon is a nut, but he's open about being a nut.
That would require introspection, something he's far too busy for.
> How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?
Musk has his own agenda.
Wild reading the news earlier to see Iran is making a concerted effort to influence Scottish Independence.
Is the idea to weaken the UK? To what end?
Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back? The CIA and MI6 are no stranger to destabilising regimes, and yet surely it would be more common knowledge if we were employing people to post anti-Putin propaganda on Russian forums?
> Is the idea to weaken the UK? To what end?
Yes, of course, the same with Brexit. It is is in Iran and Russia's interests for their enemies to be divided and distracted by internal conflict.
Iran is very much an ally of Russia. The theory I have seen for Moscow wanting Scottish independence is that they might remove the UK's only nuclear sub port from their newly independent country.
Also, it would be a general black eye for the UK, which has been very supportive of the defense of Ukraine.
That sounds like the blundering VP/president in The Diplomat. I wonder if it's instead North Sea Oil, and Iran preferring a UK with less energy independence.
Why wouldn't an independent Scotland continue producing oil from the North Sea? It's one of the main talking points for independence: "we get to keep that money."
BTW, I had not seen that show, but if they are getting things even close to accurate once in a blue moon, then I may do so. Thanks.
Is North Sea Oil even economically viable nowadays? The break-even cost is pretty high there.
If we are to take our natural place as the inventors and leaders of "The West," you know... democracy and all that boring stuff... wouldn't it be nice to have a source that is within reach, until we ween ourselves off of fossil fuels?
Another answer: with sanctions on Russian oil, and hopefully finally waking up to the fact that we cannot rely on any traditional foreign partners... yes.
Look at what China has done. They know they have no reliable sources and delivery routes for liquid fossil fuels. So, they took the reigns of their own destiny and created PV and battery production on a scale that changed the world.
Meanwhile, we in the EU, let Northvolt go under, and we closed down domestic PV production... like babes in the woods. (children wandering the the forest full of wolves)
Letting Northvolt shut down was one of the dumbest strategic things in modern European history, and that is saying a lot. I still have hope that it can somehow be resurrected.
"We" implies that the entire EU would have to be ready to support an expensive project. Surely Scotland cannot do it alone.
The question is whether this makes sense when Norway produces cheaper hydrocarbons just next door. The production sites there are every bit as vulnerable to Russian attacks as those next to Scotland.
I am curious, what do you think of the concept of European Federalism, to some extent?
It seems completely impossible, and yet somewhat inevitable. As I write this, I am sitting just a 30 minute drive into Silesia from the CZ border. In my car I receive PL, CZ, and DE radio stations.
The first I heard of the concept of a Federalized EU, it was from very excited international younger folks in Prague.
>Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back?
Until USAID got gutted, yes. Now not sure.
"Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back?"
You have it backwards. Americans were the first to do that, Russia and other were clearly lagging behind and acting in response.
scottish independence occurring likely ends the UK nuclear deterrent (or makes it much harder practically)
a couple hundred thousand dollars to potentially eliminate the UK as a nuclear power? seems like a no brainer if you're iran/russia
Probably but it's also more complicated than such a simplistic analysis. I think they want to jam the communications in general. Make big problems seem small. Make small problems seem big. Make people suspect legitimate debaters of being trolls.
Twitter pays more for US impressions so slop accounts often target a US audience and the payments are relatively more attractive to people in less developed countries. Aside from the fact that Americans are only 4% of the world population. What about this is surprising?
There is no evidence presented that there is any state sponsored conspiracy going on. Nor would you need one to explain what we're seeing.
The author also presents no evidence that Pro-Trump accounts are disproportionately represented among accounts lying about their country of residence.
Ultimately, this is just evidence-free gesturing at some grand conspiracy. Cherrypicking the bits that are red meat to her (and apparently HN's) audience.
So... Is Musk really trying to say he didn't know this before election? This has to be investigated, as it has implications far beyond Musk. This is basically a global scandal.
No slop accounts being run from third world countries is not a global scandal
The scandal is he most likely knew the election is being manipulated via his platform, but didn’t say anything, because it was in “his” candidate’s favor.
At this point, does it not make sense that Israel just become an additional US State or Territory? At least that way they can be taxed, regulated and controlled like any other US territory. If we are committed to providing absolute protection for them like we would a state, they should just become part of the US. Their existing government structures should be absorbed into the US and all their citizens be made US citizens and subject to tax and rule of the law of the US.
That’s crazy
To be honest, I'm not sure it is a 'covert influence network'.. Or at least, that is a much more conspiratorial turn of phrase than I would use here.
It strikes me as wage arbitrage if anything, an opportunity for these engagement farmers to make very good money (relatively), an opportunity which was all-but-explicitly created by Elon Musk's payout system.
All else aside, its very funny that this is an example of a market-maker once again (un)intentionally destabilizing the social fabric they talk so much about.
4chan’s /pol/ has had the flag forever, and “show flag” is a typical callout.
Only the normies are surprised and the pearl clutching on HN is farcical. You should know better by now.
I guess the outrage must be manufactured so let’s all join hands and pretend we are shocked by this news and demand something be done, I guess. Slow news week.
There’s just so much money in tard wrangling.
Capitalism is responsible for much of this without the need for organisational control.
Am I the only one who feels like the article is at least partially written by AI?
yes
It's not just Americans that are being targeted. If you look at prominent far-right pseudo-influencers (i.e. identities not tied to a real living person) in Germany, the result is just the same. Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa - not Germany.
Or it's everyone being targeted by scammers posing as Gazans - these scammers are, for me, the vilest of the vile. No matter which team one is on regarding this particular conflict... abusing the dire situation in which many Gazans legitimately are to grift money is outright wrong.
We need to hold Russia and China, the most likely actors pulling the strings, accountable. No more niceties, no more playing with the big guys, until this kind of warfare stops. And so we should treat every country hosting the low-level agents. Clean shop or get hammered. I'm sick and tired of cyber crime, propaganda warfare and scamming our elderly. Enough is enough.
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Wow. What a substantive comment.
As the article mentions a lot of the accounts probably just using VPN services. Remember when Elon exposed the US government in cahoots with Meta and Twitter actively shadow banning people for free speech on legitimate topics such as covid, covid vaccines, masks, and the woke agenda?
The "Twitter Files" absolutely did not expose anything like that, despite what Lord Genius Elon tried to imply. At best it exposed internal discussion and policies that may have suppressed posts related to Covid, but showed that the Biden administration was largely (largely doesn't mean never) uninvolved with that. It seems like the most they asked was in regards to the "Hunter Biden Laptop" issue and that was largely with posts that were showing the nudes of the women that he was sleeping with, not even posts that were just nude Hunter.
Elon then turned on Matt Taibbi and banned him from Twitter when he wouldn't go along with his lying and spin.
You mean when he teamed up with hack journalist Matt Taibi to try and make a mountain out of a molehill?
When will Hacker News target the covert non-American influencers pretending to be Americans and holding strong positions on American issues?
>likely the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since the revelations about Russia in 2016
the 2016 "revelations" were a nothing-burger, ginned up as cover for the actual dangerous conspiracy, to spy on a rival political campaign in a scandal that eclipses Watergate.
Wow, they really got you, didn't they. Good luck leaving if you ever try.
This isn't by accident. It's funny however how both sides are ignoring the foreign networks aimed at their own camp.
Right, and the outcome changes little that wasn't already known.
The interesting part of this story is why was this switched on now, by whom? Why was it briefly turned off? Was that an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle?
Briefly turned off? Oh it's back on? That's good at least. I thought he permanently turned it off the moment it didn't align with his goals.
tbh, that's just what I read yesterday, it could be turned off again. I haven't looked at that cesspit in well over a year.
Both sides? This is news to me. Where can I read more
Is there anyone left who's falling for the idea of symmetry of scope on what's going on? It reads like the most transparent attempt at diversion and denial.
... "both sides" ? seems pretty heavily one sided to me.
And DOGE was cancelled the day after. Coincidence I’m sure
Further evidence that a national firewall is a prudent idea. What kind of careless government would permit anyone in the world to have unfettered, anonymous access to their citizens' thoughts and minds?
Agreed comrade, only goverment sanctioned communication should be allowed.
Green account with a low-effort sarcastic comment. Worthy not only of downvotes, but public derision.
Do you have any desire, or idea, on how to curb cyber-agitprop from enemy nations? Is living in a world with rampant, effective, agitprop on the internet with zero reaction the least of all evils?
It's a fair question. No, no desire to curb anything because of who is going to do the curbing. Any regulating entity (government or private) will use subjective judgement and will invariably devolve into censorship. The concern of course is that humans as a crowd are dumb, but on the other hand I think you give individuals too little credit. A smart person won't get his/her political views from random X posts.
The problem is that most americans do not know first hand how the real censorship looks like. In the context of the previous discussion in that thread, chinese and russian firewalls block any discussion of gay rights issues. Do you think the US will be any different? We are all humans with the same deficiencies. Any "firewall", however it is implemented, will be a double edged sword that will eventually start cutting one way, and you won't like the result.
To sum it up, yes, it's the least of all evils.
If you would like to deride the answer, I assure you I am quite immune to the effort.
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unless you're searching history for previous postings how is this related or a proper response?
He does this a lot. Very weird behavior.
Another recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981599
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Touched a nerve? I have quite a few gay and trans friends. They tend to agree with my views which is live and let live. Their lifestyle is not a problem, and they afford me the same courtesy.
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Example of a neonazi who isn't white [1]. The Believer (2001, with Ryan Gosling) is a decent fictional movie about how this could work [2], and I also liked Rompen Stomper (1992, with Russell Crowe) [3] and La Haine (French for 'the hate', 1995, with Vincent Cassel) [4] about the phenomenon in general but there's likely more recent, good material as well as non-fiction available. I also had a colleague student who was IMO racist, but he was himself what we in NL call halfbloedje (in this case: mother black, father white, divorced).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiel_Smit
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247199/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105275/
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/
The specific example I cited was the "we are coming for your children" chant in NYC, which is way beyond demanding to "live and let live". Things like this give an insane amount of ammunition to the anti-gay movement. You are lying by twisting my words, thankfully, the posting history is all there for everyone to see.
I always supported equal rights and dialogue, and voted accordingly. That's why I do have problems with militant individuals like youself that create a complete mockery of the issue by refusing to think, resorting to insults, eating their own and actually causing the real harm to any rights movement. Who would want to be in the same voting block with someone who seems to be off the rails?
Of course you will next say that you don't believe me and will pull more proof from wiki, but I don't give a flying duck. Bye.
Effectively a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028422, so while I agree this is important news that should be widely covered, we don't need another thread.
They should be merged in that case.
Until we see the source code for how X is determining the geo-location, all bets are off.
This could just as easily be X, trying to influence opinions on the nature of America's divisive classes, which is to say there is just as much evidence that is the case as any other circumstances one might conclude.
Make sure that tin foil hat is secure there
Yeah bro, war is peace.
Exactly. Using Twitter as a primary source for this is dubious. Already seen a few accounts prove that they are where they say they are even though X shows them as being half way across the world.
Following occams razor, I think they released a broken feature and have taken it down since then to fix it. Which leads all these "revelations" to be based on incomplete or false data. Not to say the site isn't filled with bots and influence campaigns, it absolutely is. But basing that conclusion on this location information is foolish.
Meanwhile the collective is fully prepared to just roll right along with this conspiracy theory like its reality.