Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hindustantimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 328 posts

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

#301

Post by Zigurd »

mlrtime wrote: post #265
energy123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

This is not pointing to the Russia government trying to influence the election to gain favoritism. "For the most part, the people who run troll farms have financial rather than political motives; they post whatever receives the most engagement, with little regard to the actual content" BuzzFeed News investigation "didn't find concrete evidence of a connection" and "Facebook said its investigations hadn't turned up a…

The reason I've mentioned the UK investigation is that they uncovered an elaborate multi hundred million dollar money laundering pipeline, including a bank that was bought by Russian mobsters, that was supporting and harvesting money out of fairly low level crime in the UK. It's not just sabotage operations and poisoning exiled dissidences that are readily understood to be part of espionage. Spies often work with criminals. Sometimes in unexpected ways.

I've been in touch with tech people in Eastern Europe. Grey zone warfare is very real in their countries.

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

#302

Post by pfannkuchen »

array_key_first wrote: post #270
pfannkuchen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about public school, right?

No I think he's talking about Twitter. You can tell because this post is about Twitter.

Yes, my point is that the consensus reality is also the cave. It’s caves all the way down.

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

#303

Post by pfannkuchen »

protocolture wrote: post #300
pfannkuchen wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say it was fake, per se. What happens is undersampling that conveniently aliases with a supporting story for the present moral zeitgeist. It’s not hard to find samples that contradict the story. This happens primarily in history, but also in auxiliary classes that touch on history or morality such as various humanities courses and what little is covered of economics.

The Private Catholic school I attended was forced to teach a particular religious education curriculum by the state. However, that curriculum was highly modular, and the only testing of their methodology was final test scores. So we skipped the entire section on islam (Test was "Pick 2 religions and compare them, we were given catholicism and judaism), and we also skipped every chapter under catholicism that implied…

Sure, everyone knows this about religious schools. Does everyone accept this about secular schools? My impression is that they do not.

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

#304

Post by pfannkuchen »

davkan wrote: post #257
pfannkuchen wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say it was fake, per se. What happens is undersampling that conveniently aliases with a supporting story for the present moral zeitgeist. It’s not hard to find samples that contradict the story. This happens primarily in history, but also in auxiliary classes that touch on history or morality such as various humanities courses and what little is covered of economics.

And this is in contrast to private schools how? Just that they may diverge from the current moral zeitgeist to insert their own morals in the same places?

I’m not contrasting with private schools, I’m just not sure 100% of private schools do this so I focused on what I know.

It’s kind of funny how everyone projects their own dialectic framing on statements, and assumes that a person opposing side A automatically supports whatever is side B in their own mind.

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

#305

Post by nickthegreek »

intothemild wrote: post #5
tehjoker wrote: post #2

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

Because they're all from other countries. It's really not that deep

Hank Greens account was showing japan. There are sadly, flaws in the system.

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

#306

Post by LordDragonfang »

Fanofilm wrote: post #66
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.

X shows a "LOCK" icon when they are coming in VPN. To out them. Also, it shows which country's app store you installed your app. For this reason, when they use their mobile app, it will be outted that way.

Lock means the account is private, not that it's using a VPN.

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

#307

Post by davkan »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #304
davkan wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is in contrast to private schools how? Just that they may diverge from the current moral zeitgeist to insert their own morals in the same places?

I’m not contrasting with private schools, I’m just not sure 100% of private schools do this so I focused on what I know. It’s kind of funny how everyone projects their own dialectic framing on statements, and assumes that a person opposing side A automatically supports whatever is side B in their own mind.

Yes everyone does do that. Most people will not take a tangential single sentence criticism of an institution to mean that you hold none of the typical accompanying political views and are just narrowly opining on your experience.

I would imagine a large majority of readers read your original post and immediately in their head thought, “are they one of those school voucher people” or something along those lines.

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

#308

Post by kazinator »

I don't use X.

If I made an X account while vacationing in a foreign country, would that then be my country-of-origin for that account, even upon continuing to use X after returning home?

Or is it based on the IP address of last interaction?

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

#309

Post by Meekro »

majani wrote: post #296
Meekro wrote: post #264

Worth noting that these foreign accounts are pretty small. The biggest foreign pro-MAGA account mentioned in the article is "MAGA NATION" with ~400k subs, with the others being in the 10k-100k subs range. Contrast that with legit pro-rightwing accounts: @tuckercarlson (17M), @benshapiro (8M), @RealCandaceO (7.5M), @jordanbpeterson (6M), @catturd2 (4M), @libsoftiktok (4.5M), @seanhannity (7M).

Color me shocked that libsoftiktok is an actual US account. I was certain it was a foreign operative

Guessing you don't follow politics much? The owner of that account is an American woman, her identity actually leaked years ago. She's sat for several in-person interviews, I think.
Post reply on HN