\n<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, Elon Musk\u2019s X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called \u201cAbout This Account,\u201d allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed. Nikita Bier, X\u2019s head of product, said the feature was \u201can important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.\u201d Roughly four hours later, with the update in the wild, Bier sent another post: \u201cI need a drink.\u201d<\/p>\n
Almost immediately, \u201cAbout This Account\u201d stated that many prominent and prolific pro-MAGA accounts, which signaled that they were run by \u201cpatriotic\u201d Americans, were based in countries such as Nigeria, Russia, India, and Thailand. @MAGANationX, an account with almost 400,000 followers and whose bio says it is a \u201cPatriot Voice for We The People,\u201d is based in \u201cEastern Europe (Non-EU),\u201d according to the feature, and has changed its username five times since the account was made, last year. On X and Bluesky, users dredged up countless examples of fake or misleading rage-baiting accounts posting aggressive culture-war takes to large audiences. An account called \u201cMaga Nadine\u201d claims to be living in and posting from the United States but is, according to X, based in Morocco. An \u201cAmerica First\u201d account with 67,000 followers is apparently based in Bangladesh. Poetically, the X handle @American is based in Pakistan, according to the feature.<\/p>\n
At first glance, these revelations appear to confirm what researchers and close observers have long known: that foreign actors (whether bots or humans) are posing as Americans and piping political-engagement bait, mis- and disinformation, and spam into people\u2019s timeline. (X and Musk did not respond to my requests for comment.)<\/p>\n
X\u2019s decision to show where accounts are based is, theoretically, a positive step in the direction of transparency for the platform, which has let troll and spam accounts proliferate since Musk\u2019s purchase, in late 2022. And yet the scale of the deception\u2014as revealed by the \u201cAbout\u201d feature\u2014suggests that in his haste to turn X into a political weapon for the far right, Musk may have revealed that the platform he\u2019s long called \u201cthe number 1 source of news on Earth\u201d is really just a worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors.<\/p>\n
If only it were that simple. Adding to the confusion of the feature\u2019s rollout are multiple claims from users that the \u201cAbout\u201d function has incorrectly labeled some accounts. The X account of Hank Green, a popular YouTuber, says his account is based in Japan; Green told me Sunday that he\u2019d never been to Japan. Bier posted on X that there were \u201ca few rough edges that will be resolved by Tuesday,\u201d referring to potentially incorrect account information. (On some accounts, a note is appended pointing out that the user may be operating X through a proxy connection, such as a VPN, which would produce misleading information.) For now, the notion that there might be false labels could give any bad actor the ability to claim they\u2019ve been mislabeled.<\/p>\n
This is the final post-truthification of a platform that long ago pivoted toward a maxim used by the journalist Peter Pomerantsev to refer to post-Soviet Russia: Nothing is true and everything is possible. This is how you get people apparently faking that the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s account was created in Israel (a claim that has 2 million views and counting); both DHS and Bier had to intervene and assure users that the government\u2019s account was not a foreign actor. High-profile right-wing accounts that previously served as yes-men for Musk\u2014such as Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysian who purportedly lives in the United Arab Emirates and posts incessant, racist drivel about American politics\u2014have melted down over the platform\u2019s decision to dox users.<\/p>\n
Across the site, people are using the feature to try to score political points. Prominent posters have argued that the mainstream media have quoted mislabeled accounts without \u201cminimum due diligence.\u201d This nightmare is not limited to trolls or influencers. On Sunday, the Israel Foreign Ministry posted a screenshot of an account that purported to be reporting news from Gaza, next to a screenshot saying it was based in Poland. \u201cReporting from Gaza is fake & not reliable. Makes you wonder how many more fake reports have you read?\u201d In response, the person in question posted a video on X on Sunday evening insisting he was in Gaza, living in a tent after military strikes killed his wife and three children. \u201cI\u2019ve been living in Gaza, I am living now in Gaza, and I will continue living in Gaza until I die.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watching all of this unfold has been dizzying. On Sunday, I encountered a post claiming that, according to the \u201cAbout\u201d feature, a popular and verified Islamophobic, pro-Israel account (that posts aggressively about American politics, including calling for Zohran Mamdani\u2019s deportation) was based in \u201cSouth Asia\u201d and had changed its username 15 times. When I went to X to verify, I noticed that this same account had spent Saturday posting screenshots of other <\/em>political accounts, accusing them<\/em> of being fake \u201cPakistani Garbage.\u201d This is X in 2025: Potentially fake accounts crying at other potentially fake accounts that they aren\u2019t real, all while refusing to acknowledge that they themselves aren\u2019t who they say they are\u2014a Russian nesting doll of bullshit.<\/p>\n There are a few ways to interpret all of this. First is that this is a story about incentives. Platforms not only goad users into posting more and more extreme and provocative content by rewarding them with attention; they also help people monetize<\/em> that attention. Just before the 2016 election, BuzzFeed<\/em>\u2019s Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander uncovered a network of Macedonian teens who recognized that America\u2019s deep political divisions were a lucrative vein to exploit and pumped out bogus news articles that were designed to go viral on Facebook, which they then put advertisements on. Today it\u2019s likely that at least some of these bogus MAGA accounts make pennies on the dollar via X\u2019s Creator program, which rewards engaging accounts with a cut of advertising revenue; many of them have the telltale blue check mark.<\/p>\n As Bellingcat<\/em>\u2019s Eliot Higgins noted on Bluesky, X\u2019s architecture turns what should be an information ecosystem into a performative one. \u201cActors aren\u2019t communicating; they\u2019re staging provocations for yield,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe result is disordered discourse: signals detached from truth, identity shaped by escalation, and a feedback loop where the performance eclipses reality itself.\u201d Beyond the attentional and financial rewards, platforms such as X have gutted their trust-and-safety or moderation teams in service of a bastardized notion of free-speech maximalism\u2014creating the conditions for this informational nightmare.<\/p>\n The second lesson here is that X appears to be inflating the culture wars in ultimately unknowable but certainly important ways. On X this weekend, I watched one (seemingly real) person coming to terms with this fact. \u201cFascinating to look through every account I\u2019ve disagreed with and find out they\u2019re all fake,\u201d they posted on Saturday. To be certain, X is not the main cause for American political division or arguing online, but it is arguably one of its greatest amplifiers. X is still a place where many journalists and editors in newsrooms across America share and consume political news. Political influencers, media personalities, and even politicians will take posts from supposed ordinary accounts and hold them up as examples of their ideological opponents\u2019 dysfunction, corruption, or depravity.<\/p>\n How many of these accounts, arguments, or news cycles were a product of empty rage bait, proffered by foreign or just fake actors? Recent examples suggest the system is easily gamed: 32 to 37 percent of the online activity around Cracker Barrel\u2019s controversial logo change this summer was driven by fake accounts, according to consultants hired by the restaurant chain. It\u2019s impossible to know the extent of this manufactured outrage, but it doesn\u2019t necessarily matter\u2014the presence of so much fakery makes it possible to cast aspersions on any piece of information, any actor, or any conversation to the point that the truth is effectively meaningless.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth stepping back to see this for what it is: the complete perversion of the actual premise of not just social media but the internet. Although this crisis centers on X, most major social-media networks have fallen victim to variants of this problem. Fakery and manipulation are inevitable for platforms at this scale. Even when Twitter and Facebook were more committed to battling outside influence or enforcing platform rules, they were playing whack-a-mole. The idealism that these companies were founded with\u2014Mark Zuckerberg wanted to connect the world, and Musk has said he wants to maximize free speech (Twitter\u2019s original founders used similar language)\u2014has decayed as they steered their products toward maximizing profits and playing politics. The self-proclaimed techno-utopians in Silicon Valley who have helped build, invest in, or cheerlead for these companies have enabled this ruin. They\u2019ve traded reality for profit and prioritized technologies that aren\u2019t just soulless and amoral, but inhuman<\/em> in the most literal sense of the word.<\/p>\n A rational response to all of this would be for people to log off. Indeed, that now seems like the least likely, but most optimistic, conclusion\u2014that a group of people who realize they\u2019re being goaded into participation in an algorithmic fun house decide to opt out of a psychologically painful discourse trap altogether. We should all be so lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the weekend, Elon Musk\u2019s X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called \u201cAbout This Account,\u201d allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[91,3402,18707,92,5175,18349],"class_list":{"0":"post-35064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-elon","9":"tag-hall","10":"tag-mirrors","11":"tag-musks","12":"tag-poisoned","13":"tag-worthless"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}