The accounts being discussed here have pushed agendas within the US, and commented on US politics regularly. Many are also named to echo political movements, like some MAGA accounts.
However, these ‘political influencers’ have been found to be based outside the US, raising questions about the motives.
One profile going by ‘MAGA NATION’ with a follower count of over 392,000, is based out of eastern Europe. Similarly, ‘Dark Maga’ a page with over 15,000 followers is based out of Thailand. ‘MAGA Scope’ which boasts over 51,000 followers is actually operated out of Nigeria, and ‘America First’, an account with over 67,000 followers is based out of Bangladesh.
“At this time thousands of MAGA-aligned influencer accounts and large political pages that claim to be based in the U.S. are now being investigated and exposed with many of them traced to India, Nigeria, and other countries,” a news aggregator page on X noted.
Archive: https://archive.ph/DYs5O
It kinda already does. If you have your own instance you can see people’s IPs.
And what about VPNs?
Or what about rotating residential proxies?
If I want to, it’s not that hard to fake your location
The biggest point of this is that Twitter was so lazy that these guys didn’t even have to try to hide their location, so they didn’t and cut cost
VPN usage is identifiable, by design - you may be able to obscure the country of origin, but not that a VPN is being used (with the exception of a private VPN, but those are rare, nontrivial and cannot be used in abundance without giving away that they are a VPN).
None of that solves that you can hide your country of origin, but displaying country of origin and a flag if a user is using a probable VPN would do a great deal for transparency.
That’s not the same as making them publicly visible.
I’m worried that the actors we most need to be worried about are more than able to hide their origin countries if they need to. I mean even I could do that if I wanted to.
I agree. If they want to expend the resources to manipulate public opinion then hiding their identity is not going to be a problem.
On the internet it has never made sense to take someone’s claimed location or identity as fact, it’s been that way for 25 or 30 years and I feel like I’m going insane seeing so many people apparently realize this for the first time.
I don’t know that your point makes much difference. The vast majority of people don’t care about hiding who they are; in fact, quite a lot want you to know so you’ll engage with them. A few of them may be of concern for whatever reason. The industrialized manipulation of social spaces would certainly continue to hide who they are, do there’s likely no change. Whole we’re going down this rabbit hole: In fact, faking your displayed location specifically to incite feelings one way or another is probably even better than hiding it entirely.
Some might actually believe me when I say I am a cartoon dog.
Dangit, I thought the internet was where nobody would know I was a dog
Well, thats certainly helpful for every user who only interacts with an instance they run, and no other federated instances.