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
Country of origin is just IP based? Like VPN users are shown as from their VPN server?
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
Shame if a Ukrainian drone strike were to take out a few troll farms.
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.
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.
…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.
“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.”
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.
Those are endpoints. The funding comes from Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other miscreants.
says who?
X is blocked in Russia. That is why there are none listed. They have to use VPNs. Russia is the main culprit.
where did you see that in the article?
When did I say it was. It is well known that X is not accessible in Russia and has not been for years. These aren’t rogue citizens of Russia ffs. This is State sponsored and they, like many of us, use VPNs. Your slip is showing.
that’s a lot of accussations without any sources provided.
The MAGA followers are out of non-America. The Anti-MAGA leaders are out of non-America, or using a VPN.
Interesting.
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
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
[edit]
AI slop?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
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
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.
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.
