A new transparency feature on X has ignited a political firestorm after screenshots circulated online claiming the US Department of Homeland Security’s official account was listed as being based in Israel. The tool, which appeared over the weekend, lets users view an account’s current or previous location by tapping the join-date field. While designed to expose foreign-run troll farms, many of which masquerade as American political voices, it instead triggered a wave of speculation about high-profile accounts, including a series of MAGA-branded profiles that appeared to originate from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
Offshoring is so bad, even the DEPARTMENT of HOMELAND SECURITY has to use workers in other countries.
Ridiculous right! Surely there’s a junior in Israel who could do a better job than Kristi Norm
I’m instantly blackballing any site that fails to mention both right and left profiles were from other countries. It’s insane. Because of this yellow journalism, people on right leaning websites think it was only liberal accounts that were foreign and people on left leaning websites think it was only conservative accounts.
It was both. If any time over the past 3-4 years, you saw a tweet that got you riled up, that got you furious at the other side, that made you so upset you couldn’t function for the rest of the day; you were likely reading something from a troll farm in Russia or Africa.
That’s what we should be talking about. Instead, we are focused at laughing at the other side for not realizing their house is on fire, while our own house is also up in flames.
Do you have any examples of high-profile left-leaning accounts that were showing overseas locations?
#Proud_Democrat was found to be from Kenya.
While it’s more anti-MAGA than strictly left-leaning, #republicansagainsttrump was found to be from Austria.
Just like other both sides arguments, when you look at the real problems they are really just caused by 1 side.
Well said. BOTH parties have been screwing us for years. Just because one may be more corrupt than the other, it doesn’t change the fact that both are corrupt.
I’m a third-party voter from now on, regardless how how mad Lemmy is about it. I’m not playing the two-party game anymore.
Tho for the record, I have never been so upset by a tweet or something online that it caused me not to be able to function. Lemmy needs to calm down and not get so worked up.
I get your point tho!
There hasn’t been any independently verified evidence of this so far.
Though I haven’t seen any denials, either.
The DHS itself and Nikita Bier, a bigwig at X, have made posts on X denying it. But obviously they aren’t the most trustworthy bunch to use in this case, hence the desire for independent verification.
What would convince you ?
they dont need to literally run DHS/other social media accounts when it’s immediately obvious to anyone with functioning CTS’s that they own all major US/western media appartuses. refusing to acknowledge genocide is pretty obvious tell
I read where Musk already nerfed this feature
Not yet. It’s still showing on my account.
Thanks for the update.
Sorry you are going to get downvoted for admitting that you still use xitter
I only use it because my fav bands that I follow are on there , and my local news team is on it.
Since astroturf ist a hot topic again, I’m wondering what percentage of polarizing communication is done by such destabelizing agents in Germany.
It was a fake.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/11/24/dhs-israel-x-account/
They’ve made no determination in that link.
They said it can’t be checked because it’s not there and that grey check accounts never had this feature. If you follow this story overall, there’s so many stories of people proving they live in the states and their profile shows something else. Because VPNs exist.
Edit: Hank Greene’s account showed him as based in Japan. The whole thing is just nonsense. https://bsky.app/profile/hankgreen.bsky.social/post/3m6hlqkbxqc2n
Point being, is that they didn’t make truth/fake determination.
Also, who uses Israeli based VPNs? Or Eastern Europe?
Pretty sure you can set your location to almost anywhere with most VPNs.
Snopes? I thought that became unreliable years ago.
Better check Snopes to verify the truthfulness of that statement! 🫠
