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
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.
> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
The shadows on the wall aren't fake, they are just... shadows of real things. Plato's cave is about having an incomplete view of reality, not a false view of reality.
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.
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.
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.
It looks like this shows where each account was originally created from. So new accounts can get around it, but all existing accounts that didn't have the foresight to be using a VPN from the start are now burned.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Daily reminder (for myself especially) to engage as little with social media (reading/commenting) as possible. It's a huge waste of time anyways not like I don't have better things to do.
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?
Reminds me of a japanese news article about that topic where they exposed some of these accounts - these are mostly from India and other poor countries were posting fake engagement makes them a LOT more money than any other job. In this case there were some accounts that searched for Japanese earthquake news and posted condolences etc to drive up their numbers (this was after the 2023 Noto earthquake).
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.
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.
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 :) )
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 79.0 ms ] threadThe shadows on the wall aren't fake, they are just... shadows of real things. Plato's cave is about having an incomplete view of reality, not a false view of reality.
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.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-us...
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?
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
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.