Users posing as rightwing Americans are operating internationally, per the platform’s transparency feature
Many of the most influential personalities in the “Make America great again” (MAGA) movement on X are based outside of the US, including Russia, Nigeria and India, a new transparency feature on the social media site has revealed.
The new tool, called “about this account,” became available on Friday to users of the Elon Musk-owned platform. It allows anyone to see where an account is located, when it joined the platform, how often its username has been changed, and how the X app was downloaded. As soon as the update was rolled out, users found numerous MAGA and rightwing influencers who presented themselves as patriotic Americans were operating from other countries.
“This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” wrote liberal influencer Harry Sisson. “Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this.”
Some of that is just the nature of living in a global society. Someone moves for work/political reasons but still cares about their previous country. And, increasingly, they are more able to criticize it because they don’t (know they) have to care about getting detained at a border crossing or whatever else.
That isn’t at all to say that there aren’t entire economies built around misinformation and propaganda. But so much of this has been immediately tainted by xenophobia by Both Sides and so forth. Not to mention all the people who think they "gotcha"d government officials posting from israel… right after an extended trip by the trump admin to israel.
Like all things, people actually need to apply a bit of critical thought and look at how that account has been representing itself rather than just a kneejerk “You failed my purity test so you are Other and you no longer matter and maybe all you Others should stop existing”
The significant representation described in the article is not “some ppl who may have moved”.
Yes, they focused on MAGA in the article, but it doesn’t make it less significant.
And that is a subset of the accounts.
Again, the problem is all the “gotchas” from people who translate “These influencers are clearly people in a call center” with “No accounts outside of Ireland should have any say on Irish politics”