The accounts being discussed here have pushed agendas within the US, and commented on US politics regularly. Many are also named to echo political movements, like some MAGA accounts.
However, these ‘political influencers’ have been found to be based outside the US, raising questions about the motives.
One profile going by ‘MAGA NATION’ with a follower count of over 392,000, is based out of eastern Europe. Similarly, ‘Dark Maga’ a page with over 15,000 followers is based out of Thailand. ‘MAGA Scope’ which boasts over 51,000 followers is actually operated out of Nigeria, and ‘America First’, an account with over 67,000 followers is based out of Bangladesh.
“At this time thousands of MAGA-aligned influencer accounts and large political pages that claim to be based in the U.S. are now being investigated and exposed with many of them traced to India, Nigeria, and other countries,” a news aggregator page on X noted.
Archive: https://archive.ph/DYs5O
Not that surprising knowing how much countries like russia invest in their troll farms and how much influence has been applied on Americans from the outside.
Good feature overall, Facebook has this feature too. I was not surprised that many nsfw shorts creators on the page are actually India or similar locations based. Making much of a sense, since the clicks are now generally being generated by using sora
…Democratic cicles…
Proceeds to list 4 MAGA accounts
I’m not claiming that left leaving policics is immune to this but it feels like there are a lot more prolific right leaning ones.
It’s kinda funny really. Outside influencers push the right opinions because it will destabilize the country. But they do it by saying the left will destroy the country.
Not the best headline in the world, I know. It rolled out in the middle night so only a few outlets across the pond caught wind of it first.
“I hope that everyone sees, regardless of their specific reason, that the enemy is outside of the house. The people posing as Americans with big American opinions but are actually operating from a basement across the world have one common goal - to destroy the United States. We have our issues, but we really can’t allow them to succeed.”
Elon:
“Yeah, we’re just gonna turn that feature right back off here for a second…nothing to see, don’t worry about it.”
Extremely disingenuous title. Not surprising, every time I come across the Hindustan Times they are slobbing the knob of fascists.
Gullible morons.
The shocking thing here is not that there are MAGA accounts from outside the US, but that twitter introduced a feature which would expose that
The thing about lying, is you have to keep doing it and be really good at it to never get caught lying ever again. Telling the truth is so much less complicated and avoids situations like this from happening.
Every new feature Twitter adds just increases the chance that they’re going to undo something they’ve been lying about/hiding all these years.
Melon doesn’t think that far. He fired most staffs that would disagree with him, remember?
It adds to the fact his other companies like SpaceX are run by competent people and not him. He is just someone with very poor impulse control sitting at the very top, just to manipulate the markets.
Alexis Wilkins, FBI director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, also added, …
Who?
(the fuck cares what some two but MAGA country singer says?)
The Fediverse needs to implement something like this. We already have a problem, and it is important to stop this before it gets worse.
People need to implement proper “firewall rules” in their brain’s “OS”.
It kinda already does. If you have your own instance you can see people’s IPs.
That’s not the same as making them publicly visible.
I’m worried that the actors we most need to be worried about are more than able to hide their origin countries if they need to. I mean even I could do that if I wanted to.
I agree. If they want to expend the resources to manipulate public opinion then hiding their identity is not going to be a problem.
On the internet it has never made sense to take someone’s claimed location or identity as fact, it’s been that way for 25 or 30 years and I feel like I’m going insane seeing so many people apparently realize this for the first time.
Some might actually believe me when I say I am a cartoon dog.
Dangit, I thought the internet was where nobody would know I was a dog
I don’t know that your point makes much difference. The vast majority of people don’t care about hiding who they are; in fact, quite a lot want you to know so you’ll engage with them. A few of them may be of concern for whatever reason. The industrialized manipulation of social spaces would certainly continue to hide who they are, do there’s likely no change. Whole we’re going down this rabbit hole: In fact, faking your displayed location specifically to incite feelings one way or another is probably even better than hiding it entirely.
And what about VPNs?
Or what about rotating residential proxies?
If I want to, it’s not that hard to fake your location
The biggest point of this is that Twitter was so lazy that these guys didn’t even have to try to hide their location, so they didn’t and cut cost
VPN usage is identifiable, by design - you may be able to obscure the country of origin, but not that a VPN is being used (with the exception of a private VPN, but those are rare, nontrivial and cannot be used in abundance without giving away that they are a VPN).
None of that solves that you can hide your country of origin, but displaying country of origin and a flag if a user is using a probable VPN would do a great deal for transparency.
Well, thats certainly helpful for every user who only interacts with an instance they run, and no other federated instances.
I’d wager most activity here is non-human.
I do find it strange that this is surprising to some.
It’s been pretty obvious to us external observers.
At the time, the bot accounts claim was always difficult to prove. There were mountains of anecdotal evidence but nothing concrete. Not anymore.
The thing that did it for me was several years ago when Russia disconnected the whole country from the Internet for a day and Reddit instantly transformed. Nearly all of the trolls in political threads disappeared, and discussions became nicer and way more the left-leaning.
Yes; as with so many revelations, the facts shouldn’t be surprising, but the evidence is actionable where the assumptions weren’t.
Instagram is just as bad. Some accounts make provocative comments but never reply. Looking at their profiles as well, they have little to no followers or no post at all. It’s like with Reddit in which accounts that are months or years old with no activity, and then suddenly become activated posting hateful single issues.
The intention is to divide the people so that powers-that-be hoodwink us while stealing from our pockets. Many of us know better that the posts are ragebaits. However, social media companies do nothing about bad faith actors because they benefit from angry discourse to inflate engagement and attention for more traffic and advertising. You wonder who are the people are surprised by this? It’s mainly those who don’t expand from their narrow experience and like digital brain rot contents.
The intention of foreign interference campaigns is to create unrest and distrust of institutions in the target country.
The intention is to divide the people so that powers-that-be hoodwink us while stealing from our pockets.
Ah so you’re doing that too.
So… what is your country of origin?
I guess I’m a little surprised at the diversity of where these pages are based, lmao. I thought it would be a lot more Russia, Israel.
Plenty of troll farms are in third world countries, which are paid by powerful state actors behind the scenes, exploiting the economic desperation of people from these countries. Last year’s country-wide anti-immigration riot in the UK started with a single post of a fake news, which has been traced to a user in Pakistan. The user was interviewed and said he was simply paid and didn’t think there will be profound consequences.
A lot of troll farms were raided during the Biden era. While it wasn’t enough to change the tide, I can imagine that combined with Russia’s war on Ukraine being a prime motivation for the administration’s interest in AI.
Who says it isn’t? The geolocation only does the first hop. Of course, in the case of Nigeria, it’s organized crime running this with forced labor and being paid off by international interests to do it. It’s more profitable than nigerian prince scams.
Alot of shell companies is my bet.
I think the geography is that of bot farms. The money comes from somewhere else. My guess it’s probably the same people you’d suspect, and they are not foreign. It’s the kind of people that would sell out their own country for a .5% reduction in their tax rate.
Was it just a meme I saw, or is the DHS account really based in Israel?
I’m not sure it’s a satire. The sign up date was 2008. Which only raises more questions.
They are the paymasters. But they can employ their workforce from all over the world.
I’m surprised it is getting caught by this feature. I thought routing those accounts through a US based connection was table stakes. But, I guess there is no point bothering until people actually are able to see.
It’s painfully obvious X is a cesspool of Muskbots and Russian seedbots accounts.
I think we give Russia too much credit. I didn’t even see it mentioned in the article but I did see “Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and the nondescript Eastern Europe.” A lot of countries are in Eastern Europe.
392,000 people were tricked by a person who isn’t even smart enough to use a VPN.
Its generous to suggest 1 follower = 1 person
Odd that Xitter should be the dump that officially reveals this, as the reveal runs counter to their interests.
They just aren’t that smart, only evil and selfish
They need the faithful to get over this before the midterms, so it’s being revealed now. MAGA will be fine with this, as they are fine with anything that boosts their movement.
How long until he turns it off?
Pretty sure he already did based on other comments I’ve seen around other sites.
Well shucks.
Hopefully long enough for MAGA to question even a small portion of their existence
Sorry, but introspection is woke.
Remind me of this book I own
AI slop?
[edit] definitely AI slop. check out the fingers and the messed up details on the shoulder. Also, What kind of engine looks like that?It’s a Photoshop of a real book cover
It’s been used as a sort of meme template with different titles for over a decade, long before AI image generators were a thing
Not everything is made by AI it’s literally a photograph of a book I own.
Oh, well, then I digress and in that case
🤣
That is not really a thing MAGA does.
The MAGA followers are out of non-America. The Anti-MAGA leaders are out of non-America, or using a VPN.
Interesting.
