”Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.
In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.”
These so-called "America First" and "MEGA" accounts have been driving a wedge within the conservative party for a while. Many speculated that these were largely foreign accounts, but it was hard to prove, until now.
Many of the racist "conservative" voices are being shown to be from Iran or other countries.
During the 2016 election, it was big in the news that a whole ring of fake-news social media accounts and news websites was run out of North Macedonia.[0] And not out of nefarious meddling in American internal affairs, but because the men involved knew American culture well enough to know that riling up readers in a wealthy but politically polarized country could bring in profit. How fast that story was forgotten.
They aren’t requiring it though - they are just noting it on your profile. That seems like a very reasonable approach that lets the reader decide how much it matters.
Try telling that to: Discord, Microsoft, Facebook, Paypal, Google, or most any major US based service.
Your account will get pre-locked due to "reputational quality" immediately. Usually, they then demand photo ID, phone number or app, or some other onerous process.
If you need a VPN but dont want this "bad quality VPN smell", what you're looking for is a "residential IP VPN". Those look and smell like a Comcast IP, but are VPNs.
Oh I know, I run into this frequently. I was on a work trip not long ago and had my Uber and Lyft accounts locked because (a) I use then infrequently and (b) I always have a VPN on when traveling.
We've known this is a thing for quite some while. The Russians have been running a bunch of these propaganda accounts at least as far back as the 2016 election (see the Mueller report).
This is different. There are not ideological in nature, they're looking for that revenue share that can change the life of someone living in a low-cost country.
Being pro-MAGA just happens to be the only thing that works really well (aside from gimmick accounts that repost from subreddits). If Elon suddenly made a 180 into being anti-MAGA and tweaked the algorithm to reflect that, these "bots" would switch their message as well.
Russia doesn't control X moderation policies or algorithms. These accounts have gained the purchase they have because Silicon Valley and Elon Musk specifically now see it as advantageous to sow racial animus and division, and to scapegoat migrants for domestic problems which are in fact caused by elite looting. This is being done to strengthen the status quo regime, not undermine it.
I just pointed to evidence this was happening several years before Elon had anything to do with Twitter takeover, all the way back when Obama was still in office.
One of the central points of the Mueller report is that they were organized and operated at a large scale, running major social media accounts and were infiltrating various fringe groups such as the Tea Party and BLM.
Though it's worth noting this was happening under Prigozhin's lead, and since he's fallen out of a window now, it's unclear what's become of his troll factories.
You could pilot a 747 through the range that encompasses what one might mean by "a large scale." None of the Mueller findings really showed anything likely to have had a substantial impact on popular discourse or voting, or anything within even 2, probably 3 orders of magnitude of the algorithmic reach of the modern day Xitter bluecheck flying monkeys. These accounts couldn't even get bluechecks back then!
I'm not as sure and would want to consider the angles a bit more.
I ponder how effective this would be against an adversary sufficiently motivated to look like they're not using a VPN. And then does it result in a false sense of trust, since a user thinks the system more reliably detects a VPN then it does. Or an adversary who has bypassed the system to then point to it to build additional trust.
This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.
It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.
It has become so common that now when one of them writes "colour" or something there is a meme reply of using a screenshot from "Inglorious Basterds" of the scene where an SS officer catches out a spy because he uses a non-typical (for Germans) hand gesture for the number 3.
It's not a lot of effort to make them appear as if connecting from the USA without the use of VPN. Giving them a label based on their ... current proxy? ... is not a solution at all.
VPNs were already there, so why bother with a different approach. That's also something the whole "age verification", "let's protect the children from x" online is going to run into - the root cause of all that is not that there are means to access certain content in a certain way, it's the purpose and context in which the access takes place.
So for X to solve its authenticity issue... that's a tricky one. They want to allow "all opinions" and yet they want to limit the ones that aren't authentic. So how do you know if a post is authentic? What makes a person more or less "authentic"?
For me, it's really a fundamental issue of "this medium is not suitable to measure or label authenticity" (social media).
Because it doesn't really matter that much. People will check country when they disagree with the account in order to dismiss it, people won't care about it when they agree with the content.
I would say that privacy conscious people simply gave up on contributing and commenting. Non privacy conscious are those who are public figures anyway like politicians or journalists. Trolls turned more sophisticated and vicious as they are compensated and oftentimes threatened to do so.
everybody wants to be american. nobody with agency is rooting for anything other than the US. seriously, if youre not topblasting the S&P, i dont know what to tell you. theres like the entire 2nd and 3rd world combined waiting for their paycheque to come in every month so they can spend it on the US.
by 2100, we are gonna have a graveyard of langauges that nobody speaks anymore.
People in general don't talk about America because they want to be Americans. Some of them do it because they are worried about the effect that it could have in the rest of the world. Others because they have empathy about people suffering under the government (local or foreign). Others just because it's entertaining and sometimes stranger than fiction, like somebody that watches Netflix.
I'm so sorry that your circle isn't worried about what's happening around them. I'm happily surrounded by young and middle aged people that cares about their neighborhood, city, and national politics. I'd prefer that they didn't have to worry because everything was perfect, but this is what we have, and I'm happy that near me there's people with empathy and solidarity feelings.
Not in Europe. I know personally several people who have moved here recently, and none who want to go the other direction. In fact there's been an uptick in the number of people who've told me they'd be reluctant to even visit the US.
Personally I'm not fussed, but I've definitely cooled on any plans I had to move back stateside.
They don't care about being American. They want the sweet American dollars that X is paying for engagement. They figured out the MAGA crowd is the easiest to engage, so that's where they go.
"“When you read content on X, you should be able to verify its authenticity. This is critical to getting a pulse on important issues happening in the world,” posted Nikita Bier, Head of Product at X, back on October 14, 2025."
That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.
> That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.
I recall that Twitter had a serious account takeover problem which reached the point that eve high profile accounts were hijacked.
I'm going to be honest, I have no issue with this.
For anyone that it matters for, they won't care it shows they are using a vpn and for anyone trying to be deceitful using a vpn then it will downplay their credibility.
I don't like the idea of linking VPN usage with something shady or illegal. Privacy is a human right, and knowing that I'm using a VPN or not doesn't change how "authentic" or truthful the post is.
The crusade against VPNs is grating to me too. But as long as X is not actually restricting VPN users in any way?
"A guy that posts popular incendiary takes about US politics like it's his job is routing through VPNs and his real location is unknown" might be valuable information to the public.
I think it is reasonable to expect privacy when reading social media. Not so much when posting routinely to millions of people while claiming to be some non-anonymous person you aren’t.
Does the distinction not make sense from your perspective?
I think, in regimes with total metadata surveillance, the only authentic online speech will rely on reassurance that the handset won’t be able to be tracked down. Without that condition, I have multiple reasons to devalue the speech, even if only a little.
And I think that the Nazi-salute guy who runs Twitter is playing a game with this.
On the contrary, the World Wide Web is anonymous by the default. The only reason we constantly need to login into places is because big corps want to have walls around their data... and full visibility on what we do online so they can sell it for a lot of money.
In a perfect world, I’d like the user to have a choice. And that way I could post things anonymously if I wanted. However there would still be the implication of posting anonymously.
In the states, I desperately want a state-verified ID system that I can use to post on social media. However I don’t want it to be mandated.
It’s very difficult to know what the median VPN user would do without one. For some people, it’s not an afterthought and those people are the ones with valuable opinions.
My account is a simple personal account with less than 3,000 followers. It does show a warning stating that I might be using a VPN. I do use AdGuard with the Mask IP setting set to a random number, and the DNS is set to Mullvad’s DNS.
Yeah. This feature seems mostly fine, and fairly effective at highlighting troll farms.
There's been a whole slew of the most prolific accounts that were spamming inflamatory political propaganda, ostensibly targeting Europe or the US that have been reveal to operate out of India, Pakistan, south east asia, etc.
> Or theres a lot of people who like to troll and propagandize americans for nationalism and racism
I think it's a more coordinated and professional operation that you are suggesting. The US and even western Europe in general has been constantly hammered by Russian bots and professional accounts spewing all sort of extremist and sensationalized content that is aligned with the Kremlin's agenda. It's not limited to Twitter too, as places such as Reddit's conservative subreddit is renowned for being mainly a Russian psyop with barely any US citizen posting there.
Websites can still guess that an IP is non-residential. There's a difference between an IP at Comcast and an IP at DigitalOcean. This takes some effort to work around.
Self-hosting a VPN is not entirely straightforward. If you rent a server from Hetzner, for example, and your IP address is linked to Hetzner, it's obvious that it's not a genuine residential IP address.
What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.
X has a pandemic of people pretending to be Americans (or Westerners in general) saying edgy or controversial things in order to encourage engagement and subsequently earn money from X's program. This is why this feature was added.
IMHO the program itself just encourages misinformation and should be scrapped.
That would explain why the new location feature doesn't work for that account. I suspect that's also why the feature went live and then was immediately taken down. When it came back up, the locations of certain accounts were hidden. More info:
This follows from the other changes made exposing fake/bot/scam X accounts created in different locations posing as "real" users. This just takes it into another level.
Unrelated, but the amount of ads on Vice.com has become insufferable to the point where I cannot read the article without an ad-blocker with any default installed browser.
If you don't want to switch to Firefox and are still using a Chromium-based browser, get Ublock Origin Lite [0] which still works.
This is a good thing.
Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-influencers-accidenta...
”Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.
In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.”
I agree it is a good thing.
These so-called "America First" and "MEGA" accounts have been driving a wedge within the conservative party for a while. Many speculated that these were largely foreign accounts, but it was hard to prove, until now.
Many of the racist "conservative" voices are being shown to be from Iran or other countries.
During the 2016 election, it was big in the news that a whole ring of fake-news social media accounts and news websites was run out of North Macedonia.[0] And not out of nefarious meddling in American internal affairs, but because the men involved knew American culture well enough to know that riling up readers in a wealthy but politically polarized country could bring in profit. How fast that story was forgotten.
[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science...
There are plenty outside of Iran too… :)
Such groups certainly have the resources to use residential proxies to fool such checks.
Just like all things, the easier you make it the more people will abuse it.
Now their hand is forced, and they will actually have to try and mask their location.
But it will also create false signals for people using VPNs for legitimate reasons. It's a mistake to think this kind of thing means anything at all.
Serious groups do, most are just some random operations farming engagement for pennies.
We should criticize their content tho, not form, shape or location.
Companies requiring that you use potentially poor privacy and security protocols isn't a good thing. Using a VPN doesn't make one a bot or a spammer.
They aren’t requiring it though - they are just noting it on your profile. That seems like a very reasonable approach that lets the reader decide how much it matters.
Yep that was my misunderstanding, they aren't being as strict with it as I thought when skimming the article.
Try telling that to: Discord, Microsoft, Facebook, Paypal, Google, or most any major US based service.
Your account will get pre-locked due to "reputational quality" immediately. Usually, they then demand photo ID, phone number or app, or some other onerous process.
If you need a VPN but dont want this "bad quality VPN smell", what you're looking for is a "residential IP VPN". Those look and smell like a Comcast IP, but are VPNs.
Oh I know, I run into this frequently. I was on a work trip not long ago and had my Uber and Lyft accounts locked because (a) I use then infrequently and (b) I always have a VPN on when traveling.
We've known this is a thing for quite some while. The Russians have been running a bunch of these propaganda accounts at least as far back as the 2016 election (see the Mueller report).
This is different. There are not ideological in nature, they're looking for that revenue share that can change the life of someone living in a low-cost country.
Being pro-MAGA just happens to be the only thing that works really well (aside from gimmick accounts that repost from subreddits). If Elon suddenly made a 180 into being anti-MAGA and tweaked the algorithm to reflect that, these "bots" would switch their message as well.
I don't think this is actually anything to do with Russia, it's just people finding it profitable to spread muck.
Russia doesn't control X moderation policies or algorithms. These accounts have gained the purchase they have because Silicon Valley and Elon Musk specifically now see it as advantageous to sow racial animus and division, and to scapegoat migrants for domestic problems which are in fact caused by elite looting. This is being done to strengthen the status quo regime, not undermine it.
I just pointed to evidence this was happening several years before Elon had anything to do with Twitter takeover, all the way back when Obama was still in office.
The fact that it existed in some nonzero quantity at some point before the choreographed Musk takeover does not contradict what I wrote in any way.
One of the central points of the Mueller report is that they were organized and operated at a large scale, running major social media accounts and were infiltrating various fringe groups such as the Tea Party and BLM.
Though it's worth noting this was happening under Prigozhin's lead, and since he's fallen out of a window now, it's unclear what's become of his troll factories.
You could pilot a 747 through the range that encompasses what one might mean by "a large scale." None of the Mueller findings really showed anything likely to have had a substantial impact on popular discourse or voting, or anything within even 2, probably 3 orders of magnitude of the algorithmic reach of the modern day Xitter bluecheck flying monkeys. These accounts couldn't even get bluechecks back then!
I'm not as sure and would want to consider the angles a bit more.
I ponder how effective this would be against an adversary sufficiently motivated to look like they're not using a VPN. And then does it result in a false sense of trust, since a user thinks the system more reliably detects a VPN then it does. Or an adversary who has bypassed the system to then point to it to build additional trust.
This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.
It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.
It has become so common that now when one of them writes "colour" or something there is a meme reply of using a screenshot from "Inglorious Basterds" of the scene where an SS officer catches out a spy because he uses a non-typical (for Germans) hand gesture for the number 3.
It's not a lot of effort to make them appear as if connecting from the USA without the use of VPN. Giving them a label based on their ... current proxy? ... is not a solution at all.
If it’s not a lot of effort, why aren’t they already doing that?
VPNs were already there, so why bother with a different approach. That's also something the whole "age verification", "let's protect the children from x" online is going to run into - the root cause of all that is not that there are means to access certain content in a certain way, it's the purpose and context in which the access takes place.
So for X to solve its authenticity issue... that's a tricky one. They want to allow "all opinions" and yet they want to limit the ones that aren't authentic. So how do you know if a post is authentic? What makes a person more or less "authentic"?
For me, it's really a fundamental issue of "this medium is not suitable to measure or label authenticity" (social media).
Because it doesn't really matter that much. People will check country when they disagree with the account in order to dismiss it, people won't care about it when they agree with the content.
Cat and mouse, the next step.
Now do the pro-Gaza influencers.
Do you think this wouldnt be happening on both sides of the political spectrum?
I would say that privacy conscious people simply gave up on contributing and commenting. Non privacy conscious are those who are public figures anyway like politicians or journalists. Trolls turned more sophisticated and vicious as they are compensated and oftentimes threatened to do so.
actually incredibly bullish for america.
everybody wants to be american. nobody with agency is rooting for anything other than the US. seriously, if youre not topblasting the S&P, i dont know what to tell you. theres like the entire 2nd and 3rd world combined waiting for their paycheque to come in every month so they can spend it on the US.
by 2100, we are gonna have a graveyard of langauges that nobody speaks anymore.
You think foreign interference in your politics means everyone wants to be American? That's a very, very optimistic view of what's going on.
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People in general don't talk about America because they want to be Americans. Some of them do it because they are worried about the effect that it could have in the rest of the world. Others because they have empathy about people suffering under the government (local or foreign). Others just because it's entertaining and sometimes stranger than fiction, like somebody that watches Netflix.
I'm so sorry that your circle isn't worried about what's happening around them. I'm happily surrounded by young and middle aged people that cares about their neighborhood, city, and national politics. I'd prefer that they didn't have to worry because everything was perfect, but this is what we have, and I'm happy that near me there's people with empathy and solidarity feelings.
> everybody wants to be american
Not in Europe. I know personally several people who have moved here recently, and none who want to go the other direction. In fact there's been an uptick in the number of people who've told me they'd be reluctant to even visit the US.
Personally I'm not fussed, but I've definitely cooled on any plans I had to move back stateside.
They don't care about being American. They want the sweet American dollars that X is paying for engagement. They figured out the MAGA crowd is the easiest to engage, so that's where they go.
"“When you read content on X, you should be able to verify its authenticity. This is critical to getting a pulse on important issues happening in the world,” posted Nikita Bier, Head of Product at X, back on October 14, 2025."
That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.
> That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.
I recall that Twitter had a serious account takeover problem which reached the point that eve high profile accounts were hijacked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking
Of course owners of dead accounts don't complain.
The way Elon Musk's Twitter decided to render blue checkmarks useless leads me to believe this is by design.
I'm going to be honest, I have no issue with this.
For anyone that it matters for, they won't care it shows they are using a vpn and for anyone trying to be deceitful using a vpn then it will downplay their credibility.
I don't like the idea of linking VPN usage with something shady or illegal. Privacy is a human right, and knowing that I'm using a VPN or not doesn't change how "authentic" or truthful the post is.
The crusade against VPNs is grating to me too. But as long as X is not actually restricting VPN users in any way?
"A guy that posts popular incendiary takes about US politics like it's his job is routing through VPNs and his real location is unknown" might be valuable information to the public.
I think it is reasonable to expect privacy when reading social media. Not so much when posting routinely to millions of people while claiming to be some non-anonymous person you aren’t.
Does the distinction not make sense from your perspective?
I think, in regimes with total metadata surveillance, the only authentic online speech will rely on reassurance that the handset won’t be able to be tracked down. Without that condition, I have multiple reasons to devalue the speech, even if only a little.
And I think that the Nazi-salute guy who runs Twitter is playing a game with this.
Most people are terrible at determining how authentic or truthful a post is. So not data to help them do that is helpful.
Whatever right to privacy that may exist goes out the window when you’re posting on the World Wide Web.
On the contrary, the World Wide Web is anonymous by the default. The only reason we constantly need to login into places is because big corps want to have walls around their data... and full visibility on what we do online so they can sell it for a lot of money.
Well, I want logins everywhere. I’d like comments made with mTLS to sort to the top. Maybe just comments with mTLS signed by FSF.
Slowly but surely turning into 4chan /pol/, now with country flags too!
that happened like 3 years ago THOUGH
In a perfect world, I’d like the user to have a choice. And that way I could post things anonymously if I wanted. However there would still be the implication of posting anonymously.
In the states, I desperately want a state-verified ID system that I can use to post on social media. However I don’t want it to be mandated.
This is a dick move, but let's not present VPNs add much in the way of privacy or security on average.
It’s very difficult to know what the median VPN user would do without one. For some people, it’s not an afterthought and those people are the ones with valuable opinions.
My account is a simple personal account with less than 3,000 followers. It does show a warning stating that I might be using a VPN. I do use AdGuard with the Mask IP setting set to a random number, and the DNS is set to Mullvad’s DNS.
I suppose this could target people who use DNS other than, say, the biggest ten.
Or theres a lot of people who like to troll and propagandize americans for nationalism and racism
Yeah. This feature seems mostly fine, and fairly effective at highlighting troll farms.
There's been a whole slew of the most prolific accounts that were spamming inflamatory political propaganda, ostensibly targeting Europe or the US that have been reveal to operate out of India, Pakistan, south east asia, etc.
Funny that you are being downvoted. Maybe we need this feature at hackernews too :-)
> Or theres a lot of people who like to troll and propagandize americans for nationalism and racism
I think it's a more coordinated and professional operation that you are suggesting. The US and even western Europe in general has been constantly hammered by Russian bots and professional accounts spewing all sort of extremist and sensationalized content that is aligned with the Kremlin's agenda. It's not limited to Twitter too, as places such as Reddit's conservative subreddit is renowned for being mainly a Russian psyop with barely any US citizen posting there.
will they also advertise the service provider being used or will you have to ask?
Because I suspect "warning this person isnt an idiot" doesnt turn out to be the warning they expect.
I do not use twitter, so do not care.
But if you use a fake name and fake email, which people should be using on twitter, who cares.
Also if you self host your VPN, how would twitter know. Looks like only people using a commercial VPN will be flagged.
Websites can still guess that an IP is non-residential. There's a difference between an IP at Comcast and an IP at DigitalOcean. This takes some effort to work around.
There are tons of services like maxmind that can just tell you the origin of an IP - whether it is a datacenter one or a residential one.
Self-hosting a VPN is not entirely straightforward. If you rent a server from Hetzner, for example, and your IP address is linked to Hetzner, it's obvious that it's not a genuine residential IP address.
What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.
Too bad. Social media has been turned against the US for too long by foreign adversaries. This will help end it.
X has a pandemic of people pretending to be Americans (or Westerners in general) saying edgy or controversial things in order to encourage engagement and subsequently earn money from X's program. This is why this feature was added.
IMHO the program itself just encourages misinformation and should be scrapped.
X's program? They're not doing this to earn money. They're trying to sow division in the US, and they've been very successful.
Wasn't there something about DHS's account originating in Israel? Suprised it's not being discussed here.
That would explain why the new location feature doesn't work for that account. I suspect that's also why the feature went live and then was immediately taken down. When it came back up, the locations of certain accounts were hidden. More info:
https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1p4i95z/the_off...
This follows from the other changes made exposing fake/bot/scam X accounts created in different locations posing as "real" users. This just takes it into another level.
Unrelated, but the amount of ads on Vice.com has become insufferable to the point where I cannot read the article without an ad-blocker with any default installed browser.
If you don't want to switch to Firefox and are still using a Chromium-based browser, get Ublock Origin Lite [0] which still works.
[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
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