Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.
I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.
Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth.
AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions.
Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model capabilities. Something like 99% of positive model capabilities comes from 10% of the training data (forget exactly).
I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the owners and creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better.
I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world.
Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.
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.
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.
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change.
IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away.
Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
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.
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
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.
They’re not really fawning over me. They just like to hang out on twitter. It has pretty colors and cool graphics. I mean, especially compared to HackerNews. I mean, HN is a bastion of logic and cool-headed discussion, but to many girls they just see a boring text website colored orange and beige.
The sort of people who think "girls need colorful websites and a bunch of them are friends with me on Twitter" are the same ones who think "that stripper really likes me".
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)
Yep, I effectively landed my favorite job by engaging with the Erlang community on Twitter. I miss it, but it just got to be too toxic during the 2016 election cycle (in fairness, everything was too toxic then, and it hasn’t gotten better since).
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!
> My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
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.
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.
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?
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
The stats don't bear that out. Bluesky has been losing momentum since the election, with its DAU dropping from around 3.5 million to under 1.5 million today. For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. Right-wing alternative platforms had similar issues sustaining momentum, despite a much stronger push factor (right-wing people kept getting banned). It's hard to overcome the power of Twitter's network effect.
Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.
When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like.
And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.
It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
> 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.
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
> 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.
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.
every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
While the location now shows US, X notes that the account location might not be accurate due to use of VPN
Just 'now'... not when signing up for their account?
It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.
And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance.
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.
if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )
I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.
People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea.
If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?
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.
Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.
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.
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. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.
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.
> The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question.
This is the pattern with all Russian influence operations; they’re always implied to be ominously large and end up being laughably small.
American political polarization had nothing to do with the Russians; this is just the refrain of frustrated Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ill-conceived policy. Israel has always had far more sway over American politics.
This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election. I gave you one small example, it's on you to look for the full picture rather than jump to an erroneous conclusion based on god knows what motivations.
The problem in particular is not only the scale but that this propaganda is not solely directed at altering US policy towards Russia, it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country. If the US is fighting itself then it isn't fighting Russia after all.
> They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election.
Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing.
> it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country.
That is likely one of Russia’s goals; it is not likely that the Russians were the origin of these political cleavages. This was the problem with the entire Russian influence narrative; it was a post-hoc rationalization for why exceptionally bad ideas like diversity and multiculturalism were rejected by a subset of the population. In essence: “If they hadn’t been exposed to these Facebook posts, they never would have had these stupid ideas put into their heads.”
It was also impossible to take seriously because most of the elected officials promoting it were receiving campaign contributions from AIPAC.
In my personal experience a lot of the people involved in Facebook Russian influence operations are post Soviet exodus diaspora boomers. They share the content produced by the troll farms.
Interesting. The extent of Russian influence I noticed peaked in the Spring of 2016. Lots of self-professed fascists were converting to East Orthodox Christianity and subscribing to the idea that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China formed some of the last governments on earth not controlled by a Rothschild-owned central bank.
I know of a few defectors who ended up there; one was an American that went by the name of “Texas,” while another one was a Canadian who moved there to be a farmer in hopes of protecting his family from what he saw as degenerate values being propagated by the Canadian education system. Texas was supposedly murdered by Russian soldiers while operating with Kremlin-aligned militias in the Donbas region. The Canadian is still living in Russia and has a YouTube channel.
I suspected a regular rotation of Kremlin agents were on /pol/ during the Syrian Civil War. Russian sentiment was generally far more positive prior to the invasion. It’s possible this was all organic and just collapsed as people saw what they did to Ukraine; I really have no idea.
Frog Twitter for their part pivoted on Russia quite quickly in the early 2020s, around the time Thiel was buying out podcasts.
It would be silly if the Russians weren't stirring shit up in the enemy camp.
That's what the Russians do. It's too difficult to improve their own country, their own lives, and their own prospects, so they focus on the next-best strategy for the acquisition of power, which is dragging everybody else down to their level.
There were a number of accounts that got doxxed in the last year that were demonstrated to have Indian owners. Engagement farms have been doing this since Trump’s first term; the goal is primarily ad revenue, not political influence. I didn’t see any that were Israeli but everyone knew those accounts were there.
It’s possible the Russians have contracted influence campaigns out to Indian and Israeli firms, but the simpler explanation is just that India is continuing its long and storied history of using telecomm networks to scam unwitting boomers while Israel is continuing its long and storied history of being the worst greatest ally of all time.
I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.
Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
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
Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
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.
Advertising revenue directly from X, posting affiliate links to products or gambling/crypto sites, and directly asking followers for money. Or they're being paid by clandestine operations such as Internet Research Agency.
> 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.
I was going to speculate the same thing. Seems pretty likely... a lot of systems record information about when an account was created, and IP location correlations are period sensitive (at least some of them are... my college is most likely still using its /16 and hasn't moved outside the city where it was founded)
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).
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.
It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amounts of) money. It's not even unique, there are similar grinds about sports, religion, cute animals, subculture jokes, etc.
The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.
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.
You don’t think girls use the internet? I’ve met some in real life, know a bunch who clearly aren’t fake. That’s why they hang out on twitter. Places like HackerNews are cool for guys, but not fun. Twitter may be chaotic, but it’s fun for girls and many feel comfortable there. They can post stuff, kind of like pinterest.
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.
Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other).
Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.
Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
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)
I'm not author of parent.
My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.
I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.
Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth.
AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions.
Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model capabilities. Something like 99% of positive model capabilities comes from 10% of the training data (forget exactly).
I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the owners and creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better.
I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world.
Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.
Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
"It's all fake?" "Always has been"
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.
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.
Sounds like how Congress exempts themselves from many of the laws they pass.
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.
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.
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.
No, it's live.
Residential VPNs are already so cheap.
Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.
Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change. IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away. Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...
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.
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
The internet has created low intentionality people.
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.
It’s an online bar to meet girls and flex your creativity.
If you believe those girls fawning over your creativity are real, then I've got a link for hot single milfs in your area wanting to talk to you.
They’re not really fawning over me. They just like to hang out on twitter. It has pretty colors and cool graphics. I mean, especially compared to HackerNews. I mean, HN is a bastion of logic and cool-headed discussion, but to many girls they just see a boring text website colored orange and beige.
The sort of people who think "girls need colorful websites and a bunch of them are friends with me on Twitter" are the same ones who think "that stripper really likes me".
Have you met most 20 something girls? They’ll be on insta because it has even better colors, but some do hang out on X.
Also, strippers do actually like dudes sometimes.
Not me, of course, but a buddy of mine almost married one.
Until she almost killed him trying to stab him in the crotch because she thought he was going to cheat on her.
this is blatantly biased -- most idiots here are not girls at all ! /s
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)
Yep, I effectively landed my favorite job by engaging with the Erlang community on Twitter. I miss it, but it just got to be too toxic during the 2016 election cycle (in fairness, everything was too toxic then, and it hasn’t gotten better since).
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!
> My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
I think that almost every platform has gone through a period where the latest breaking news was being published.. as it happened
IRC
Usenet
Reddit
Facebook (live)
Twitter
IRC is fine.
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.
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.
X obviously isn't the only platform where this is taking place and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
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'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?
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
> I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged…
One side has largely left X.
The stats don't bear that out. Bluesky has been losing momentum since the election, with its DAU dropping from around 3.5 million to under 1.5 million today. For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. Right-wing alternative platforms had similar issues sustaining momentum, despite a much stronger push factor (right-wing people kept getting banned). It's hard to overcome the power of Twitter's network effect.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
> For comparison Twitter has over 100 million.
We're on a thread about widespread fake/inauthentic users on Twitter right now. I see very little reason to trust those numbers.
>I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon
Hmm, interesting insight, what did they each say when you talked to them?
It's less about political leanings and more about profits. There's a reason Jack Dorsey didn't do this, or FB or Reddit.
And why IRC went from default showing IP information to cloaking
I think that's mostly to do with script kiddies trying to DoS anyone they disagreed with.
Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
Feature is online for me now. Maybe A/B test, or incomplete rollout?
I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.
When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like.
And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.
It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
> 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.
Yar.
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
> 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?
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.
every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
Niche subjects are much nicer because there's often no incentive to manipulate.
This reminds me of WeChat doing similar things a few years ago: Tencent's WeChat to reveal user locations on public account posts.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-us...
It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.
And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance.
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.
if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )
I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.
People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea.
If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?
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.
Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.
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.
Their humiliation ritual is just beginning.
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. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.
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.
Russia hires people in Africa:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
> The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question.
This is the pattern with all Russian influence operations; they’re always implied to be ominously large and end up being laughably small.
American political polarization had nothing to do with the Russians; this is just the refrain of frustrated Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ill-conceived policy. Israel has always had far more sway over American politics.
This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election. I gave you one small example, it's on you to look for the full picture rather than jump to an erroneous conclusion based on god knows what motivations.
The problem in particular is not only the scale but that this propaganda is not solely directed at altering US policy towards Russia, it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country. If the US is fighting itself then it isn't fighting Russia after all.
> They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election.
Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing.
> it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country.
That is likely one of Russia’s goals; it is not likely that the Russians were the origin of these political cleavages. This was the problem with the entire Russian influence narrative; it was a post-hoc rationalization for why exceptionally bad ideas like diversity and multiculturalism were rejected by a subset of the population. In essence: “If they hadn’t been exposed to these Facebook posts, they never would have had these stupid ideas put into their heads.”
It was also impossible to take seriously because most of the elected officials promoting it were receiving campaign contributions from AIPAC.
In my personal experience a lot of the people involved in Facebook Russian influence operations are post Soviet exodus diaspora boomers. They share the content produced by the troll farms.
Interesting. The extent of Russian influence I noticed peaked in the Spring of 2016. Lots of self-professed fascists were converting to East Orthodox Christianity and subscribing to the idea that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China formed some of the last governments on earth not controlled by a Rothschild-owned central bank.
I know of a few defectors who ended up there; one was an American that went by the name of “Texas,” while another one was a Canadian who moved there to be a farmer in hopes of protecting his family from what he saw as degenerate values being propagated by the Canadian education system. Texas was supposedly murdered by Russian soldiers while operating with Kremlin-aligned militias in the Donbas region. The Canadian is still living in Russia and has a YouTube channel.
I suspected a regular rotation of Kremlin agents were on /pol/ during the Syrian Civil War. Russian sentiment was generally far more positive prior to the invasion. It’s possible this was all organic and just collapsed as people saw what they did to Ukraine; I really have no idea.
Frog Twitter for their part pivoted on Russia quite quickly in the early 2020s, around the time Thiel was buying out podcasts.
It would be silly if the Russians weren't stirring shit up in the enemy camp.
That's what the Russians do. It's too difficult to improve their own country, their own lives, and their own prospects, so they focus on the next-best strategy for the acquisition of power, which is dragging everybody else down to their level.
You think IP addresses can't be spoofed rather easily?
What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?
You're literally posting in the comments of an article that's about the ease of hiding geographical origin.
There were a number of accounts that got doxxed in the last year that were demonstrated to have Indian owners. Engagement farms have been doing this since Trump’s first term; the goal is primarily ad revenue, not political influence. I didn’t see any that were Israeli but everyone knew those accounts were there.
It’s possible the Russians have contracted influence campaigns out to Indian and Israeli firms, but the simpler explanation is just that India is continuing its long and storied history of using telecomm networks to scam unwitting boomers while Israel is continuing its long and storied history of being the worst greatest ally of all time.
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
America outsourcing its rage is peak USA. McKinsey would be proud
It's not the USA outsourcing rage, it is foreign actors paying to manufacture rage in the USA.
While a handful troll factories are paid to destabilize USA, vast majority operate from 3rd world countries with only profit in mind.
I didn’t say WHY they are manufacturing rage. Some do it for political reasons, some for profit, some for both.
whynotboth.gif
I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.
That is still foreign actors manufacturing rage, whether it is for profit or for political motivations.
Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
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".
Yeah, rage isn't something the US needs. It's something the US's enemies need us to have.
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
Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
Why would people stop using sites that continually provide them a daily dose of righteous anger, making their dreary lives a bit more meaningful?
This video will make you angry is 10 years old now.
https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
Anger works wonders online.
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.
How are they making a living posting political propaganda of they aren’t hired?
Advertising revenue directly from X, posting affiliate links to products or gambling/crypto sites, and directly asking followers for money. Or they're being paid by clandestine operations such as Internet Research Agency.
X has revenue share for popular posts.
> 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.
I was going to speculate the same thing. Seems pretty likely... a lot of systems record information about when an account was created, and IP location correlations are period sensitive (at least some of them are... my college is most likely still using its /16 and hasn't moved outside the city where it was founded)
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.
It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amounts of) money. It's not even unique, there are similar grinds about sports, religion, cute animals, subculture jokes, etc.
The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.
Maybe most of these accounts are managed by a offshore'd social media company?
yup, for sure that is it :)
It truly is the sewer of the internet.
You think this is unique to X? If anything, it’s unique they’re exposing this.
"exposing" should have been past tense. They've quickly reverted that feature once they realized how bad it made them look.
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.
Sorry to break it to you bud, but girls on the internet aren't usually girls in real life.
You don’t think girls use the internet? I’ve met some in real life, know a bunch who clearly aren’t fake. That’s why they hang out on twitter. Places like HackerNews are cool for guys, but not fun. Twitter may be chaotic, but it’s fun for girls and many feel comfortable there. They can post stuff, kind of like pinterest.
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.
Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other).
Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.
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!
> Where are all these Israeli accounts?
The Department of Homeland Security, for one.
https://imgur.com/gallery/why-is-united-states-department-of...
> Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now!
That is exactly what is happening and what is being reported on. The thing you attribute to "weird personal bias" is being widely exposed.
We should probably examine your weird personal bias. Weird, because you could just read the article!
Indians pretend to be Israelis because they don't like Muslims who they see as similar to Pakistanis.