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.

> host of a lot of military cyber operations

Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you?

Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

Country of origin is based on IP. Many British accounts are using VPNs due to the online safety act and this is noted by X. X also shows the country of the app store the app was downloaded from which is more accurate.

Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.

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.

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.

App Store country of origin too weighs in.

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.

Residential VPNs are already so cheap.

Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.

No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.

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.

hacker news, Reddit and similar have always been about following subjects or topics you like, getting the latest discussion in a field of your interest. twitter was all about following people not topics, so you'd get a wider range of topics, but you tended to focus on accounts more and give more weight to specific users than you might here.

If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".

But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.

It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.

For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.

All social media (including HN) is horrible in some ways. And they all suffer from too many people being overly credulous to random comments.

But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.

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 though!

It’s an online bar to meet girls and flex your creativity.

A lot of people did not have trust and have been asking for this country-of-origin feature for years. Better would be if they bring back country of initial account creation, or some way to identify VPN usage.

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 meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)

It is basically two totally distinct products: the "Following" feed that you can make it as you like, and the "For You" that is just a stream of the stupidest posts imaginable by people you don't know.

Niche subjects are much nicer because there's often no incentive to manipulate.

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

if a guy in india can make great MAGA posts, is that really a problem?

its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it.

id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good)

is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.

> 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.

The propaganda apparatus will adapt if that becomes common so its not a permanent solution but it's nice for now.

> and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.

I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user.

Is it possible they enabled it back again?

All I want to know, is whether I am talking to an actual person. And I also want that person to have a single account, not multiple ones

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?

If only there was some kind of PKI that could attest the identity of the person. It's a shame, that US doesn't have a government capable of running it.

I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.

yeah, id reasonably describe the results as a list of locations where the couple bucks that twitter will pay is enough to get by.

for canada though, id like to see the CBC dedicatedly paying canadians to post canadian perspectives on social media

To add to this , twitters algo seems primed to amplify controvesial topics to boost engagements.Why some topics always seemsto keep getting boosted while others barely trend.

Which for many enterprising trolls/grifter have seen them become SEO(TEO?) experts to push their preferred narratives for clout/profit while drowning the entire timelines in a flood of noise.

After this change, accounts created in US will be sought after. Operate them through a US VPN. Voracious appetite for consuming content will be filled by outsiders. US effs up the world with violence, now world is riling up Americans with similarly worded content of their own politicians.

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

Eh. I think this is just evidence that if you pay people to have divisive opinions (as X does) then that will incentivize divisive discourse. We’re seeing it come from developing nations because it’s worth their time economically.

> 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.

Indeed. Can I interest you in the good old USA project? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d...

See exhibit 8 and such: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl

Or 10 which specifically talks about Twitter https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl

It's not the USA outsourcing rage, it is foreign actors paying to manufacture rage in the USA.

Even their political commentary is an entertainment export.

I think it's more like outsiders stoking US rage on both sides. That's a bit different than "outsourcing".

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

I doubt for the most part it's people being hired. I think mostly it's probably people in low income countries who make a living posting as different identity on social media.

> is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign

Speculation: they're resolving historical IP addresses against a current IP geolocation database. An IP which belonged to a US company in 2010 may have since been sold to a Nigerian ISP, but that doesn't mean that the user behind that IP in 2010 was actually in Nigeria.

These aren't like a single real person pretending to be Americans because of their deep interst in American politics.

These are paid astroturfers probably more like call centers, paid for presumably by all sorts of interests from foreign intelligence services, to businesses (or select executives), to internal political groups or politicians trying to manipulate public opinion.

Both political extremes are suffering from this kind of manipulation where real concerns are twisted and amplified for lets say the more gullible half of the population (gullibility knows know political alignment exclusively). The excluded middle is afraid of the people who have been manipulated this way (death threats also know no political boundaries).

> is there any technical reason why

with the development capability remaining at twitter anything is possible.

VPN?

To a billionaire, hiring a few hundred Nigerians to upvote and share their propaganda is so cheap that it’s like you buying a cup of coffee.

They use professional paid services from these low labour cost countries all the time for publicity or to control the narrative.

By some estimates 20-60% of everything you see on social media is generated by a bot farm, depending on the forum in question. An analysis of Reddit showed some subreddits are 80% AI generated.

Maybe most of these accounts are managed by a offshore'd social media company?

You think this is unique to X? If anything, it’s unique they’re exposing this.

Cause it’s a place where girls hang out to have casual online encounters. They want it as crazy as possible to keep out normie guys. Musk caters to this.

Are you trying to make sure that any criticism of X can be shrugged off by supporters and detractors alike as cheap ideological attacks? Because if you are, excellent job.

Indians pretend to be Israelis because they don't like Muslims who they see as similar to Pakistanis.

Where are all these Israeli accounts? That just seems to be your weird personal bias. Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now!