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

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

#151

Post by throwaway48476 »

lurk2 wrote: post #114
throwaway48476 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience a lot of the people involved in Facebook Russian influence operations are post Soviet exodus diaspora boomers. They share the content produced by the troll farms.

Interesting. The extent of Russian influence I noticed peaked in the Spring of 2016. Lots of self-professed fascists were converting to East Orthodox Christianity and subscribing to the idea that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China formed some of the last governments on earth not controlled by a Rothschild-owned central bank. I know of a few defectors who ended up there; one was an American that went by the name of…

Moving to Russia is an extreme outlier. These people exist but there's only a dozen or so. Numbers are not much different than the late Soviet era. In the 1920s thousands of Americans moved to Russia to build communism. Many also came back disillusioned, or died in a gulag.

On the other hand there's hundreds of thousands of diaspora Russians, and they're very pro russian. Richard Spencer's ex wife is a good example of this. Overall this is a much bigger impact than the dozen converts or a few thousand half hearted Harper's.

Obviously before the war Russia was less publicly objectionable. In Syria everyone just hated ISIS.

The /pol/ effect is nostalgia for worlds that no longer exist and we're not personally experienced. It's political flavored nostalgia instead of Pokémon collecting.

In terms of American twitter Russiagate and making Russia a red/blue partisan issue has been the most disastrous. It's simple contrarianism.

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

#152

Post by samrus »

agentifysh wrote: post #7

X 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.

It doesnt have to be US citizen only. It just has to be who they are claiming to be. If someone in india or europe wants to comment on foreign politics, thats fine. They just shouldnt be able to pretend they are from the US or anywhere else

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

#153

Post by lurk2 »

prmph wrote: post #110
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.

You think IP addresses can't be spoofed rather easily? What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?

> What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?

They’re grifters; their interest in American politics is commercial. Indians were targeting Trump supporters with fake news for ad revenue as early as 2015; this is a continuation of that model.

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

#154

Post by jsheard »

ro_bit wrote: post #72

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

Did they edit it? I stepped forward a few years and it's still there.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit...

Funny nonetheless though.

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

#155

Post by ec109685 »

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.

App Store country of origin too weighs in.

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

#156

Post by brandensilva »

afavour wrote: post #60
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 ...

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.

One of the many reasons why I try and bombard myself with different views and perspectives. Foreign vs domestic. Left vs right. Personal vs official.

I don't do this with every topic unless I'm interested in discussing something just so I'm more informed just to reduce bias.

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

#158

Post by throwaway48476 »

Zigurd wrote: post #13

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.

Most of the problem here is not gray zone warfare but just modern wow gold farmers engagement baiting for a $5 payout.

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

#159

Post by throwaway48476 »

lurk2 wrote: post #139
energy123 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election. I gave you one small example, it's on you to look for the full picture rather than jump to an erroneous conclusion based on god knows what motivations. Th…

> They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election. Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing. > it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a…

Agitprop cannot create divisions whole cloth, they can only amplify and inflame extant divisions.

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

#160

Post by awesome_dude »

macintux wrote: post #104
awesome_dude wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, I effectively landed my favorite job by engaging with the Erlang community on Twitter. I miss it, but it just got to be too toxic during the 2016 election cycle (in fairness, everything was too toxic then, and it hasn’t gotten better since).

I think that ALL communities become toxic as they grow

I often hear that one community, or another, is "really good, not toxic at all, which is true when it starts (for tech, whilst it's "new" and everyone is still interested in figuring out how it works, sharing their learnings, and actively working to encourage people to also take interest)

Then idealism works it way in - this community is the greatest that every existed ever - and whatever it is centred is the best at whatever

Then - all other things are bad, you're if you think otherwise

And, boom, toxicity starts to abound

For me, I've seen it so many times, whether in motorised transport (Motorcycles vs cars, then Japanese bikes vs British/European/American then individual brands (eg Triumph vs Norton), or even /style/ of bike (Oh you ride a sport bike, when clearly a cruiser is better...))

In the tech scene it's been Unix vs Microsoft, then Microsoft vs Linux or Apple, and then... well no doubt you've seen it too

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