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
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’s kinda hard and might be unreasonable to expect people to be alone against an industry that dedicages unprecedented amount of money and power solely to deceive people. You’re not immune to propaganda, it’s impossible to be, no matter what you tell yourself.
It kinda already does. If you have your own instance you can see people’s IPs.
Well, thats certainly helpful for every user who only interacts with an instance they run, and no other federated instances.
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.