Their humiliation ritual is just beginning.
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X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
81–90 of 328 posts
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think that almost every platform has gone through a period where the latest breaking news was being published.. as it happenedReddit
Twitter
IRC
Usenet
Facebook (live)
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#83I 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 ...
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think people en masse have trust in any of these accounts. But when your feed is filled with the kind of stuff they say day in day out it still affects your overall perspective of the world. “No smoke without fire” on a subconscious level.
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#84X 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.
> 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.
I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow.
If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion.
Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#85I 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.
Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.
Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#86I 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'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention? I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent pay…
> I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged…
One side has largely left X.
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
It's less about political leanings and more about profits. There's a reason Jack Dorsey didn't do this, or FB or Reddit.
And why IRC went from default showing IP information to cloaking
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#89I 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.
Are Azure VMs different to a VPN? Sorry I'm not the most technical. Reason I ask is because there are few people I follow that use VPNs but their location is accurate on X. Also, X also shows where you downloaded the app from, e.g. [Country] App Store, so that one might be a bit more difficult to get around.
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
#90America outsourcing its rage is peak USA. McKinsey would be proud
It's not the USA outsourcing rage, it is foreign actors paying to manufacture rage in the USA.
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I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.