It wouldn't be difficult to include a little "" icon on each post that, when hovered, shows probable location or the creation origin. It's true that VPN's will often muddy this info, and even things like phone number confirmation for 2FA or billing address for Verified badges can't be 100% reliable... but it shouldn't be too difficult to say in those cases "User likely masking location" if the pattern is detected.

Followed immediately by these groups making VPNs a standard part of their toolkit. This data is enlightening but its reveal doesn't solve the problem.

In the old days 'where it was posted from' used to be displayed on tweets, and Elon intentionally changed it to 'Earth'. Interesting to see a backpedal here, albeit concealed.

they really should. i thought they'd have a flag on the actual profile.

It’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.

It's been known for a while this is just verification. Accounts give themselves away all the time accidentally through phrases or tells. eg: A tweet from an account claiming to be from the US talking about Texas succession that mentions 'warm water ports', very few people care or think about that because all the ports on the continental US don't freeze over in the winter. (In fact very few countries do because most have as many warm water ports as they need, one of the few with significant issues with this is... Russia)

No one likes to be the bad messenger saying to Americans that they were fooled and all that hatred against their opponents (opposite party) was actually induced, not born out of their own superiority.

Why?

Govs doing influence campaigns was admitted during the twitter files [1]. While it's the US-relationship, Twitter is a global company so they're going to have other country relationships.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._8%E2%80%939...

It’s going to get flagged off of HN front page within the hour like it did the last two times someone posted about it

Hard to compete with leaders being accused of raping, corruption, and and calling for execution of political opponents for newsworthiness.

> wild that this isn't bigger news

It may be. It may not.

So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.

We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample.

I’d be surprised if journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.

I mean it's been pretty obvious for a while...

the people who would care already knew about this. the people who didn't know about this don't care (or are in denial).

Musk's like a transparent kid these days. Anything he touches seem to disappear from media - there is such thing as bad publicity after all, I guess.

We've known of foreign influence campaigns targeting Americans on social media for a long time. A significant number of HN users have a vested interest in pretending it isn't the case. Some of them are making money off it. Others are too proud to entertain the notion that they might be the gullible victims of rage-bait and disinformation. Posts on the subject usually gets flagged pretty quick, but it's getting harder to ignore the truth.

They (major news networks) are owned by Trump friendlies (Bezos/WaPo, Soon-Shiong/LAT, etc.) or they are afraid of Trump’s influence.

Most of this, to some degree, has been well established for a while.

American Republicans have relied heavily on foreign interference to achieve their goals. From social media manipulation to laundering illegal political bribes, Republicans have been doing it.

Given Musk's political affiliations, it seems unlikely that this was the intended outcome.

Because it gets clicks.

LMAO.

You've got a chance if you use Mastodon or Bluesky, but you don't have control of the X algorithm.

No it’s definitely more important that foreign countries are manipulating American politics through social media than people in poor countries are making money off of rage bait (and likely many of the latter are being paid by the former).

Here is one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/poland/comments/1p5cqcs/literally_e...

Agreed comrade, only goverment sanctioned communication should be allowed.

National firewall? No thank you.

In any case, it's manufacturing immoral and violent sentiment to the detriment of society. Why should we allow such things to percolate? What benefit is this providing to society?

scottish independence occurring likely ends the UK nuclear deterrent (or makes it much harder practically)

a couple hundred thousand dollars to potentially eliminate the UK as a nuclear power? seems like a no brainer if you're iran/russia

> Is the idea to weaken the UK? To what end?

Yes, of course, the same with Brexit. It is is in Iran and Russia's interests for their enemies to be divided and distracted by internal conflict.

Iran is very much an ally of Russia. The theory I have seen for Moscow wanting Scottish independence is that they might remove the UK's only nuclear sub port from their newly independent country.

Also, it would be a general black eye for the UK, which has been very supportive of the defense of Ukraine.

>Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back?

Until USAID got gutted, yes. Now not sure.

Probably but it's also more complicated than such a simplistic analysis. I think they want to jam the communications in general. Make big problems seem small. Make small problems seem big. Make people suspect legitimate debaters of being trolls.

But that would be a narrative violation. X.com and Elon Musk can't possibly be portrayed doing anything positive or productive.

Wow, they really got you, didn't they. Good luck leaving if you ever try.

Remember when Musk’s entire cause celebre was to expose the bot networks and paid trolls on Twitter and then he dropped all of that bluster when he realized how useful they’d be to his political goals?

> How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?

Musk has his own agenda.

yes

The "Twitter Files" absolutely did not expose anything like that, despite what Lord Genius Elon tried to imply. At best it exposed internal discussion and policies that may have suppressed posts related to Covid, but showed that the Biden administration was largely (largely doesn't mean never) uninvolved with that. It seems like the most they asked was in regards to the "Hunter Biden Laptop" issue and that was largely with posts that were showing the nudes of the women that he was sleeping with, not even posts that were just nude Hunter.

Elon then turned on Matt Taibbi and banned him from Twitter when he wouldn't go along with his lying and spin.

You mean when he teamed up with hack journalist Matt Taibi to try and make a mountain out of a molehill?

Right, and the outcome changes little that wasn't already known.

The interesting part of this story is why was this switched on now, by whom? Why was it briefly turned off? Was that an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle?

Both sides? This is news to me. Where can I read more

Is there anyone left who's falling for the idea of symmetry of scope on what's going on? It reads like the most transparent attempt at diversion and denial.

... "both sides" ? seems pretty heavily one sided to me.

Make sure that tin foil hat is secure there

Exactly. Using Twitter as a primary source for this is dubious. Already seen a few accounts prove that they are where they say they are even though X shows them as being half way across the world.

Following occams razor, I think they released a broken feature and have taken it down since then to fix it. Which leads all these "revelations" to be based on incomplete or false data. Not to say the site isn't filled with bots and influence campaigns, it absolutely is. But basing that conclusion on this location information is foolish.

They should be merged in that case.