A new feature rolled out on the social media platform X has set off waves of finger-pointing by suggesting that many account holders may not be physically located where users assume they are. Late last week, X, which is owned by Elon Musk, added more information to most accounts, including some that could provide clues on where the account user is located.
Seeming inconsistencies quickly surfaced. An account called @MAGANationX that describes itself as a "Patriot Voice for We The People" is labelled as "based in Eastern Europe (Non-EU)." The handle @American was "Based in Pakistan." An account used by a person who identifies as a journalist in Gaza now says it's "Based in" Poland and "Connected via" an app in the U.K. That may mean various things, including that the account was registered in the U.K. So far, X has not provided a definition of the terms.
Other account holders have not claimed to be in the U.S. or Americans, but they nonetheless appear as a part of American political discourse. Doge Designer, an account focused on praising Musk and his companies with 1.7 millions followers, including Musk himself, is based in India. A fan account of Ivanka Trump, which says it has "No Affiliations with @IvankaTrump" in bio, has nearly a million followers and is based in Nigeria. A similar fan account of Barron Trump, which calls itself "The most relentless and accurate fan account on X" currently has over half a million followers and is "Based in Eastern Europe (Non-EU)."
While the terms are not defined and location data can be easily manipulated, accusations that accounts were run by imposters and "astroturfs" quickly spread around X and social media more broadly. X has since suspended the @American account and the Ivanka Trump fan account, although it's unclear what policies the accounts violated. X's policy bans impersonation but allows for fan accounts.
Rage farming
It's possible that some of the accounts may indeed be people overseas pretending to be, or implying they are, Americans, said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who studies social media platforms. She said their motivation is largely financial.
"It's just a really easy way to generate rage - generate clicks in this case, generate direct monetization. That's something that we've seen on all different platforms for a very long time now. "
Other platforms, like Facebook, have increased transparency by adding location and username changes on some pages after the 2016 presidential election. The move followed revelations that teenagers in Macedonia were making money running groups and pages that catered to Trump supporters.
Darren Linvill, a professor who studies influence campaigns at Clemson University's Media Forensics lab, agreed. "In India and places outside of the U.S., it's worth the investment to pretend that you're an American in order to make more money. You can make more money as a U.S.- based influencer than you can as a Russian or Indian influencer. It's just people engaging in capitalism in all probability in most of these cases."
In many ways this trend has continued. Investigations by the tech outlet, 404 Media, showed that hustlers in developing countries have made playbooks and pipelines to generate revenue from social media by catering to things that generate engagement, like partisan rage.
While engagement farming exists along all kinds of ideological and geopolitical faultlines across the world, DiResta pointed out in a blog post that people on the right have been especially targeted by those hoping to profit from partisan political content.
Since Musk took over Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, he has slashed teams that look for covert behavior, and made account verification obsolete by making the blue checkmark that indicated an account had been verified available for anyone to purchase.
Although X's new transparency feature has shone a spotlight on possible imposters, DiResta cautioned that the bulk of influencers in American politics are still real people based in the U.S.
The data is not the final word
Engagement farming is just one way to explain seemingly inconsistent location tags. Researchers who study covert behavior online also say the data released by X, while valuable and interesting, is not reliable and have cautioned against viewing it as the sole reason to question an account's bona fides.
"I do worry about people drawing sweeping conclusions," said Emerson Brooking, research manager at the nonprofit Digital Forensics Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, "it becomes a convenient foil to dismiss any account that we disagree with."
Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer close to Trump, used the fact that one pro-Trump account was "based in Turkey" to say, "I've been telling everyone for MONTHS the Jew hate & MAGA hate is a Muslim Brotherhood psyop." In the meanwhile, influential figures on the right have platformed antisemites and their ideas.
The Israeli government decried "fake 'Gazan' accounts" in one X post, calling them "manipulative abuser [sic]."One of the accounts the Israeli government referred to appears to be that of a man in Gaza. X labeled the account as "Connected via United Kingdom App Store." On Monday, the account posted a video of the man in front of tents and clotheslines, saying to a camera, "I've never left Gaza except in 2012 when I did my Master's in international development in London." Media outlet Middle East Eye jumped to the man's defense.
The data have also turned out to be inaccurate. Three NBC journalists found that their "based in" locations were places they had travelled to recently rather than where they are currently based, the outlet reported.
Brooking said that compared to other social media networks, X and its former incarnation, Twitter, always had a stronger culture of anonymity and privacy. "X, really Twitter, gained its popularity as a tool for people to express their views. Sometimes when they were living in situations where the government would not allow them to express those views."
Questions remain about how the new location tags work. For some accounts, X displays a warning message: "Country or region may not be accurate," citing location-masking tools such as virtual private networks (VPN)
What the data can do is to add more evidence and provide a fuller picture of accounts already under scrutiny, said Linvill. He looked up some accounts whose users appeared to be British citizens commenting on Scottish independence. He and his colleagues have long suspected that the accounts are controlled by the Iranian government. One account Linvill examined now stated that it was "Connected via Iran Android App." "Lo and behold, you look at their account information now and they signed up for X on an Iranian service," Linvill said.
X did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
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