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X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

hindustantimes.com

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Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#71

Post by awesome_dude »

duxup wrote: post #19

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 ...

Probably the thing I loved about it most was the fact that I could talk directly with people that I felt had a real impact in the world

Scientists/Researchers

Journalists

Activists

Politicians

Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)

There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff

You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#72

Post by ro_bit »

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

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#73

Post by throwaway48476 »

lurk2 wrote: post #40

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 i…

Indians pretend to be Israelis because they don't like Muslims who they see as similar to Pakistanis.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#74

Post by afavour »

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?

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#75

Post by CalChris »

FloorEgg wrote: post #65
andybak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

I'm not author of parent. My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they…

> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.

I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#76

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #59
lateforwork wrote: post #24

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.

No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.

[deleted]

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#78

Post by lurk2 »

energy123 wrote: post #45
lurk2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.

Russia hires people in Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...

> The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question.

This is the pattern with all Russian influence operations; they’re always implied to be ominously large and end up being laughably small.

American political polarization had nothing to do with the Russians; this is just the refrain of frustrated Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ill-conceived policy. Israel has always had far more sway over American politics.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#79

Post by TJSomething »

andybak wrote: post #28
protocolture wrote: post #3

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.

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#80

Post by JoshTriplett »

ebbi wrote: post #48
duxup wrote: post #19

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 ...

My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately. And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber. It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now t…

> My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.

Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.

These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.

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