X exposing political accounts' location shows why trust and safety teams mattered: to combat coordinated inauthentic behavior, not “censorship” of viewpoints
from the it's-almost-as-if-there-are-some-bad- actors-online dept — For the last few years, Matt Taibbi …
TechdirtMike Masnick
Context & Ripple Effects
The location disclosure lands after X’s trust-and-safety function had already become a flashpoint, including public attacks described by a former leader of that work. It supplies a concrete test for the distinction between policing viewpoints and identifying coordinated identity deception.
Researchers and users can scrutinize whether political accounts’ claimed audience or national identity aligns with their disclosed location, increasing the visibility of suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior.
The disclosure strengthens the case that trust-and-safety operations address account networks and deceptive coordination, not merely the acceptability of political opinions.
Second-order effects
X’s monetization and enforcement systems face closer pressure to distinguish authentic political participation from accounts exploiting engagement incentives; reports of payouts for misinformation-linked content make that scrutiny commercially relevant.
Political operators can be expected to treat location and other platform-provided account signals as operational constraints, while legitimate users may face greater scrutiny when their location differs from their political focus.
Third-order effects
The episode points toward a governance model in which platform transparency, detection capacity, and financial incentives must work together: disclosure can reveal suspicious patterns, but it does not by itself establish coordination or determine enforcement.
If platforms continue rewarding political engagement while reducing specialized safety capacity, the practical debate will shift from abstract claims of censorship to whether they can reliably deter organized manipulation without overreaching.
The trend: Political-platform governance is increasingly being judged by whether product transparency and monetization rules can expose and reduce coordinated inauthentic behavior without conflating it with viewpoint moderation.
“The scale of the deception—as revealed by the “About” feature—suggests that in his haste to turn X into a political weapon for the far right, Musk may have revealed that the platform is really just a worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors.” @cwarzel https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
“.. This is X in 2025: Potentially fake accounts crying at other potentially fake accounts that they aren't real, all while refusing to acknowledge that they themselves aren't who they say they are — a Russian nesting doll of bullshit.” @cwarzel https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... […
“At 1st glance, these revelations appear to confirm what researchers & close observers have long known: that foreign actors (bots or humans) are posing as Americans & piping political-engagement bait, mis- & disinformation, & spam into people's timeline.” https://www.theatlantic.…
“The self-proclaimed techno-utopians in Silicon Valley who helped build, invest in, or cheerlead for these companies have enabled this ruin. They've traded reality for profit and prioritized technologies that aren't just soulless and amoral, but inhuman” https://www.theatlantic.c…
“Platforms not only goad users into posting more and more extreme and provocative content by rewarding them with attention; they also help people monetize that attention.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
To be certain, X is not the main cause for American political division or arguing online, but it is arguably one of its greatest amplifiers. X is still a place where many journalists and editors in newsrooms across America share and consume political news. www.theatlantic.com/te…
“The self-proclaimed techno-utopians in Silicon Valley... have enabled this ruin. They've traded reality for profit and prioritized technologies that aren't just soulless and amoral, but inhuman in the most literal sense of the word.” — www.theatlantic.com/technology/ 2...
“The presence of so much fakery makes it possible to cast aspersions on any piece of information, any actor, or any conversation to the point that the truth is effectively meaningless.”
Many thanks for @annamerlan.bsky.social for writing this piece and integrating my historical perspective. — www.motherjones.com/politics/ 202... [embedded post]
I talked to Joan Donovan about Twitter's very old foreign influence problem, which was unmasked in the funniest possible way over the weekend: www.motherjones.com/politics/ 202...
I wrote about the fake account blowup on X this weekend. A genuine post-truth nightmare and proof that these companies have polluted their platforms so thoroughly and traded reality for profit that they've undermined the very idea of what the internet is supposed to be.
“This is the final post-truthification of a platform that long ago pivoted toward a maxim used by the journalist Peter Pomerantsev to refer to post-Soviet Russia: Nothing is true and everything is possible.” — www.theatlantic.com/technology/ 2...
Lots of people are calling out the fact that X is filled with fake MAGA influencers from far away countries, but I wanted to point out that this, not “ideological censorship,” is why companies have trust & safety teams that work on stopping inauthentic behavior. [embedded post]
“While it's fascinating that X actually rolled this out, it should raise questions about those who have spent the past few years stewing in that cesspool of foreign rage-bait manipulation, insisting it was somehow an accurate portrayal of public opinion.” — https://www.techdirt…
I do find it funny that thousands of non Americans from all over the world sat down and said “hmm, how can we milk American engagement on twitter to make a quick buck”, and the first thing that came to mind was to just post Nazi shit for years on end, and it worked. Says as much
“This has created a system where it makes financial sense for people from the entire world to specifically target Americans with highly engaging, divisive content. It pays more. ” — www.404media.co/americas-pol...
“The only thing revealed by this transparency is that social media companies do not give a f*ck about this.” — Our attention is the product — There are tutorials in many languages on how to exploit that for profit, not just to stir the pot — AI makes it so easy to exploit n…
New from 404 Media: X has shown where accounts are actually being run from, revealing many MAGA accounts are actually grifters in Eastern Europe, Asia, etc. But the situation is much, much worse. Entire guides specifically on how to squeeze US audiences with AI. — www.404medi…
X's location “transparency” feature showing many MAGA accounts are based internationally reveals what we already knew: The world is using American social media and American politics as a slot machine and social media companies are directly incentivizing this: — www.404media.co/…