- Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
by protocolture
4 subcomments
- Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
by lateforwork
14 subcomments
- I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
- I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...
by agentifysh
9 subcomments
- X obviously isn't the only platform where this is taking place and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
- every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
- On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change.
IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away.
Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Related:
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
by rguiscard
1 subcomments
- This reminds me of WeChat doing similar things a few years ago: Tencent's WeChat to reveal user locations on public account posts.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-us...
by comeonbro
1 subcomments
- It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.
by mcintyre1994
0 subcomment
- I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.
- People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea.
If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?
by thomassmith65
0 subcomment
While the location now shows US, X notes that the account location might not be accurate due to use of VPN
Just 'now'... not when signing up for their account?It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.
by tb_technical
0 subcomment
- It's wild to me that the DHS account was created in Tel Aviv. Several American nationalists are Indian.
It's absolutely nuts.
by mise_en_place
1 subcomments
- Their humiliation ritual is just beginning.
- Worth noting that these foreign accounts are pretty small. The biggest foreign pro-MAGA account mentioned in the article is "MAGA NATION" with ~400k subs, with the others being in the 10k-100k subs range.
Contrast that with legit pro-rightwing accounts: @tuckercarlson (17M), @benshapiro (8M), @RealCandaceO (7.5M), @jordanbpeterson (6M), @catturd2 (4M), @libsoftiktok (4.5M), @seanhannity (7M).
by DustinEchoes
0 subcomment
- This is happening all over US social media, even here. If you ever wonder why US hatred has permeated modern culture, this is why.
- Google always thinks I am in Finland, because one of my coworkers on the same VPN is in Finland. Bonkers. Finish ads suck
- I don't use X.
If I made an X account while vacationing in a foreign country, would that then be my country-of-origin for that account, even upon continuing to use X after returning home?
Or is it based on the IP address of last interaction?
- There once were news about Fitbit or Garmin displaying workout records for users near classified military bases, and some workout routes were suspected to be in the playground of the bases.
by BhavdeepSethi
1 subcomments
- First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.
- Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
- And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance.
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
- if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )
- This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.
- I'm amused this is a new reveal for some people. Seemed the very likely case for me.
- Thank godness this feature doesn‘t exist on hackernews.
by mac-attack
3 subcomments
- America outsourcing its rage is peak USA. McKinsey would be proud
- is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country
- Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other).
Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.
- Can't beat X. Such a great feature to see which accounts might be trying to astroturf. Already accounts like Republicans For Trump, and several (mostly no-name) US flag -toting accounts were exposed for not even being based in the US.
Now if we could have other platforms do the same, and not just accidentally like with the Reddit case lol
by nextworddev
0 subcomment
- HN also needs this feature
- [dead]
by Slava_Propanei
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by ecoled_ame
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- It truly is the sewer of the internet.
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