Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, has rolled out a feature where going to the ‘Joined’ tab on one's profile, displays the country of origin for that account.
Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, has introduced the country of origin feature that seems to have thrown both the MAGA and Democrats' worlds online into chaos. Several profiles online, that had pushed certain narratives are now being found to have been operating from outside the US.
The social media platform introduced a feature where one can see the country the account is based in. One has to head to an account and click on the date joined tab, which opens up onto a new page. This shows the country where that particular account is being operated from. While the feature was briefly removed after its introduction, it has now been added again, and both sides of the political spectrum are having a field day, calling out each other online.
The accounts being discussed here have pushed agendas within the US, and commented on US politics regularly. Many are also named to echo political movements, like some MAGA accounts.
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However, these ‘political influencers’ have been found to be based outside the US, raising questions about the motives.
One profile going by 'MAGA NATION' with a follower count of over 392,000, is based out of eastern Europe. Similarly, ‘Dark Maga’ a page with over 15,000 followers is based out of Thailand. ‘MAGA Scope’ which boasts over 51,000 followers is actually operated out of Nigeria, and ‘America First’, an account with over 67,000 followers is based out of Bangladesh.
“At this time thousands of MAGA-aligned influencer accounts and large political pages that claim to be based in the U.S. are now being investigated and exposed with many of them traced to India, Nigeria, and other countries,” a news aggregator page on X noted.
It wasn't just on the MAGA side. An account going by ‘Ron Smith’ whose bio claims he's a ‘Proud Democrat’ and ‘Professional MAGA hunter’ is operated out of Kenya. The account has over 52,000 followers.
‘Republicans against Trump’ an anti-Donald Trump page on X, which tries to push politics against MAGA, was reportedly operating out of Austria. While the location now shows US, X notes that the account location might not be accurate due to use of VPN. “The Anti-Trump account “Republicans Against Trump” which 1M followed has been identified as a non-American from Austria and is currently using a VPN to hide their location,” a page said, making note of this.
‘Republicans against Trump’ has over 978,000 followers.
On a side note, an account going by ‘Mariana Times’, with over 78,000 followers, which posts pro-Israel content has been found to be based out of India.
People within the MAGA orbit have also reacted to this new feature. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna wrote on X from her personal account, “All of these pretend “pro-America” accounts that were pushing infighting within Maga are literally foreign grifters. I’m telling you, the foreign opp is real and so are the bot accounts.”
Alexis Wilkins, FBI director Kash Patel's girlfriend, also added, “I hope that everyone sees, regardless of their specific reason, that the enemy is outside of the house. The people posing as Americans with big American opinions but are actually operating from a basement across the world have one common goal - to destroy the United States. We have our issues, but we really can’t allow them to succeed.”
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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
By Lammy 2025-11-241:25 > host of a lot of military cyber operations
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
By jsheard 2025-11-241:35 Did they edit it? I stepped forward a few years and it's still there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit...
Funny nonetheless though.
By dialup_sounds 2025-11-242:432 reply The boring but more likely explanation is that "most addicted" is just a weird statistic that produced weird results.
Eglin has something like 50,000 people but it's actual population as a census designated area is more like 5000.
Oak Brook, IL was also "most addicted" but people didn't run with the idea that McDonalds HQ was running psyops.
By tracerbulletx 2025-11-242:502 reply I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.
By dialup_sounds 2025-11-245:201 reply There's a Popeye's at Eglin, maybe all that traffic was a chicken sandwich influence campaign?
By tracerbulletx 2025-11-2415:36 I'm not saying those trends charts demonstrate anything, just that commercial human astro-turfers or bot networks are no less of a thing than intelligence ones and it wouldn't really be a conspiracy theory to think McDonalds or any other company, trade association, lobbyist, PR firm etc, is operating a lot of social media accounts that could theoretically show up on a report like that if they were doing a lot of it from a specific place.
Urm. They almost certainly are though?
It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.
By dialup_sounds 2025-11-248:00 The point is that a vaguely defined throwaway line on Reddit's blog is not great evidence for either.
> military cyber operations
You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.
By adastra22 2025-11-248:50 Tor was literally invented for this use case.
OP has just completely pulled this analysis out of their ass. They aren’t all constantly running g cyber operations on Reddit, that bears zero resemblance to what cyber operations look like in real life including the point that you raised.
By subscribed 2025-11-249:14 I mean, it was a quote, and they quoted it seemingly verbatim: https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit...
Not sure what the "most addicted" means except for "over 100k visits total" but it doesn't seem to be pulled out of ops ass,
By DustinEchoes 2025-11-241:55 Daily reminder (for myself especially) to engage as little with social media (reading/commenting) as possible. It's a huge waste of time anyways not like I don't have better things to do.
By survirtual 2025-11-2410:12 Addiction is hard.
This is a special addiction because most of us are community starved. Formative years were spent realizing we could form digital communities, then right when they were starting to become healthy and pay us back, they got hijacked by parasites.
These parasites have always dreamed of directly controlling our communities, and it got handed to them on a silver platter.
Corporate, monetized community centers with direct access to our mindshare, full ability to censor and manipulate, and direct access to our community-centric neurons. It is a dream come true for these slavers which evoke a host of expletives in my mind.
Human beings are addicted to community social interaction. It is normally a healthy addiction. It is not any longer in service of us.
The short term solution: reduce reliance on and consumption of corporate captured social media
The long term solution: rebuild local communities, invest time in p2p technology that outperforms centralized tech
When I say "p2p" I do not mean what is currently available. Matrix, federated services, etc are not it. I am talking about going beyond even Apple in usability, and beyond BitTorrent in decentralization. I am talking about a meta-substrate so compelling to developers and so effortless to users that it makes the old ways appear archaic in their use. That is the long term vision.
By demarq 2025-11-2410:48 Not a good start.
Also don’t reply to this.
By protocolture 2025-11-2323:403 reply 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 outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the paper right now)
I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the 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.
The alternative seems dreadful.
Edit: I am curious why this is getting downvoted.
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
It was discussed a month or so back.
By FloorEgg 2025-11-242:37 Yeah I saw that one too, which I would think supports my point that distilling down training data would lead to more truth aligned AI.
I mean it's also just the classic garbage in garbage out heuristic, right?
The more training data is filtered and refined, the closer the model will get to approximating truth (at least functional truths)
It seems we are agreeing and adding to each other's points... Were you one of the people who downvoted my comment?
I'm just curious what I'm missing.
I didn't downvote, but it's naive to the point of irresponsibility not to assume and prepare for LLMs being weaponized in the exact way as social media as you alluded to. It's not like human nature or the nature of capitalism has changed recently.
Hoping that the tech giants will put truth over profit is folly. Hoping that audiences will reject this is viable.
By FloorEgg 2025-11-246:34 > Hoping that the tech giants will put truth over profit is folly.
I never said that though?
> Hoping that audiences will reject this is viable.
I have no clue what you mean. What is "this" refering to?
What you are hoping for will not occur.
Do hope. But hoping for a unicorn is magic thinking.
For other people, they can either count this as a reason to despair, or figure out a way to get to the next best option.
The world sucks, so what ? In the end all problems get solved if you can figure them out.
For decades I have continuously studied physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, management science, market research, economics, religion, finance, and computer science among many other things. I study for 4-5 hours on average every day, and the rest of my working hours are spent practicing my craft.
The reason I say this is that blind hope and informed hope are two different things.
Media has always relied on novel fear to attract attention. It's always "dramatized"; sacrificing truth for what sells. However AI is like electricity or computation. People make it to get things done. Some of those things may be media, but it will also be applied to everything else people want to get done. The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't keep using them. And the thing about lies is that they don't work.
For all of human history people have become more informed and capable. More conveniences, more capabilities, more ideas, more access to knowledge, tools, etc.
What makes you think that AI is somehow different than all other human invention that came before it?
It's just more automation. Bad people will automate bad things, good people will automate good things.
I don't have a problem with people pointing out risks and wanting to mitigate them, but I do have a problem with invalid presuppositions that the future will be worse than the past.
So no, I don't think I'm hoping for a unicorn. I think I'm hoping that my intuition for how the universe works is close enough, and the persistent pessimism that seems to permeate from social media is wrong.
Speaking as someone who has also spent decades both studying and applying STEM and social sciences my commentary is this:
> The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't use them.
People will and do use tools that don't work. Over time fewer people use bad tools as word spreads. Often "new" bad tools have a halo uptake of popularity.
> And the thing about lies is that they don't work.
History tells us that lies work in the short term, and that is sufficient to force bad decisions that have long shadows.
> The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't use them.
My bad. I meant won't keep using them.
> History tells us that lies work in the short term, and that is sufficient to force bad decisions that have long shadows.
What do you mean by "work"?
It sounds like you are implying that a lie "works" by convincing people to believe it?
I meant a lie doesn't work in that if you follow the lie you will make incorrect predictions about the future.
If someone acts on a lie which results in a bad decision with a "long shadow" then wouldn't that mean acting out the lie didn't work?
Lies work in the sense that they can persuade large groups of people to take courses of action based on their beleif in those lies.
They are used by bad actors to, say, win elections and then destroy systemic safeguards and monitoring mechanisms that work to spotlight bad actions and limit damage.
There are also lies, such as a common belief in Wagyl, that draw people to together and act in unison as a community to help the less fortunate, preserve the environment and common resources, and other things not generally perceived as destructive.
By FloorEgg 2025-11-247:24 > Lies work in the sense that they can persuade large groups of people to take courses of action based on their beleif in those lies.
I don't disagree with this. It's reasonable to assume I was talking about that type of "work", but I wasn't.
> There are also lies, such as a common belief in Wagyl, that draw people to together and act in unison as a community to help the less fortunate, preserve the environment and common resources, and other things not generally perceived as destructive.
I am not familiar with this specific culture but I totally get your point. Most religion works like this. I would just consider that the virtues and principles embedded within the stories and traditions are the actual truths that work, and that Wagyl and the specifics of the stories are just along for the ride. The reason I believe this is because other religions with similar virtues and values will have similar outcomes even though the lie they believe in is completely different.
I said that lies destroy, and that wasn't right. Sometimes they do, but as you have pointed out, often they don't.
By intended 2025-11-2413:19 I applaud your efforts! You stated:
> I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole.
The ratio of total hours of human attention available to total hours of content is essentially 0. We have infinite content, which creates unique pressures on our information gathering and consumption ability.
Information markets tend to consolidate, regulating speech is beyond fraught, and competition is on engagement, not factuality.
Competing on accuracy requires either Bloomberg Terminal levels of payment, or you being subsidized by a billionaire. Content competes with content, factual or otherwise.
My neck of the words is content moderation, misinformation, and related sundry horrors against thought, speech and human minds.
Based on my experience, I find this hope naive.
I do think it is in the right direction, and agree that measured interventions for the problems we face are the correct solution.
The answer to that, for me, is simply data and research on what actually works for online speech and information health.
By 01100011 2025-11-242:05 The number of otherwise intelligent folks I follow on twitter who occasionally brag or make note of their follower count without realizing 80%+ are bots is way too high.
I think that's by design though. Tolerate bots to get high-value users to participate more after they think real people are actually listening to them.
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.
By mlrtime 2025-11-2411:56 Reddit even more so, thats why you see these 'touch grass' comments littered around.
By TJSomething 2025-11-240:172 reply 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.
By thrance 2025-11-2410:21 OP's twist on the cave allegory is funny and makes sense if you take the usual modern reading, but that is very much not what Plato meant by it.
It was just a way for him to convey his "theory of forms" in which perfect versions of all things exist somewhere, and everything we see are mere shadows of these true forms. The men in the cave are his fellow Athenians who refuse his "obvious" truth, he who has peeked out of the cave and seen the true forms. All in all, it's very literal.
By pixl97 2025-11-240:48 Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
By tormeh 2025-11-240:06 "It's all fake?" "Always has been"
By BLKNSLVR 2025-11-242:08 I'll try with a Simpsons analogy:
> Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall.
Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose
> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.
By mock-possum 2025-11-248:43 This is my sentiment exactly, and you put it a lot more succinctly than I was thinking.
By pfannkuchen 2025-11-248:552 reply You’re talking about public school, right?
By array_key_first 2025-11-2413:32 No I think he's talking about Twitter. You can tell because this post is about Twitter.
By pfannkuchen 2025-11-249:441 reply I didn’t say it was fake, per se. What happens is undersampling that conveniently aliases with a supporting story for the present moral zeitgeist. It’s not hard to find samples that contradict the story. This happens primarily in history, but also in auxiliary classes that touch on history or morality such as various humanities courses and what little is covered of economics.
By davkan 2025-11-2412:05 And this is in contrast to private schools how? Just that they may diverge from the current moral zeitgeist to insert their own morals in the same places?
By lateforwork 2025-11-2323:5414 reply 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.
By giancarlostoro 2025-11-242:011 reply Yes and no. It also shows which app store country the account is tied to, and that my friend is a little bit more work. It also shows an icon when it suspects VPN. A lot of these foreign run accounts are in fact not using VPN and their host country matches their app store country. Lots of "e-girl" type of accounts are foreign owned, and there's an insane number of racist accounts LARPing as American run from places like Turkey, and other countries. I think my favorite call out was some Canadian account that nobody realized was Canadian. I think if you're going to inject yourself in the politics of other countries your audience deserves to know if you're not even living there.
By 01100011 2025-11-242:07 You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
By throwaway48476 2025-11-240:084 reply 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.
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
It’s ironic but also completely typical.
Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
By mlrtime 2025-11-2412:00 It seems a little self evident? A heroin addict might say they love it and never want to quit, at the same time say it's harmful, should be banned and nobody should ever try it.
Okay, I came across another video talking about Roblox and it's pedo problems, and I think that's problematic. And I might talk about that if the topic goes toward "problematic things that are currently on my mind".
And with that statement you ironically insinuate that I'm a pedo
You're not the first person that made that argument (that the people talking about a problem actually are the real perps!), but from my perspective it feels more like an easy way to make it socially unacceptable to talk about categories of issues. Which is likely intended by the person making this argument, likely because... You see were this is going?
By viraptor 2025-11-249:39 Parent said "many" and didn't in any way insinuate it's an implication you can run the other way.
By yupyupyups 2025-11-243:14 >Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-240:35 Sounds like how Congress exempts themselves from many of the laws they pass.
By mlrtime 2025-11-2411:58 > Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
How do you know this as a fact?
By Ajedi32 2025-11-2415:10 It looks like this shows where each account was originally created from. So new accounts can get around it, but all existing accounts that didn't have the foresight to be using a VPN from the start are now burned.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
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.
By SmirkingRevenge 2025-11-2414:561 reply Interesting. Maybe gps location data snapshots factor into it. You could probably defeat that with app permissions though. GPS spoofing is also possible, but a lot more friction for troll accounts.
Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.
By neom 2025-11-2416:00 I was thinking about it a bit more this morning, in Costa Rica I used a local sim from a local carrier, but since then I've been traveling but using esims from Airalo, they still use a local carrier, but I wonder if it's kinda like how the 2 factor auth stuff often won't let you use a VOIP/twilio number it needs to be from a real carrier, I wonder if x has a matrix of signals they use to decide to switch it or not, and within the carrier metric, esim re-seller is deprioritized over a real telco or something? Who knows, but it's kinda fun to think about! :)
By Fanofilm 2025-11-240:11 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.
By mlrtime 2025-11-2412:03 It was a bad example as it's quite easy to detect cloud operator endpoints (their internet gateway). Try it sometime and see how many web site make you go through some captcha maze.
They would most likely use residential proxy/vpns that show your traffic coming out of a regular household ISP. They can be purchased for cheap.
By hypeatei 2025-11-240:23 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.
By lateforwork 2025-11-240:021 reply You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
By giancarlostoro 2025-11-242:03 You can but a lot of people use their phone and the official apps. It also shows if you primarily use a browser. :)
By acheong08 2025-11-242:31 It's not via IP address. I created my account using a US data center IP back in 2022 from Malaysia. I am now in the UK, using a Swiss VPN IP. My location shows up as Japan...
By trollbridge 2025-11-242:11 I would suspect they are deducing country of origin via ad targeting, which is far more precise than just geolocating IP addresses.
By chrismorgan 2025-11-243:06 Google thinks my account is American for Play Store geo limiting purposes, and if I recall correctly would only let me update it by adding a payment card, which I refuse to do. I don’t know where they even got that idea—they should have known full well I was Australian. My best guess is that for a few years I used a phone I bought while visiting America. But it was neither my first phone nor my most recent, and the account was at least five years old before I even visited the US.
By dawnerd 2025-11-241:50 Exactly how anyone still scraping Twitter does it. Dirt cheap. Same with accounts to use to get around api limits.
By lateforwork 2025-11-240:22 Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
By adastra22 2025-11-248:51 You do? I don't.
No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.
By quotemstr 2025-11-240:10 No, it's live.
