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X.com is gonna snitch you out to the public if you use a VPN
- cyanydeez 1y agoOr theres a lot of people who like to troll and propagandize americans for nationalism and racism
- marginalia_nu 1y agoYeah. 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.
- haizhung 1y agoFunny that you are being downvoted. Maybe we need this feature at hackernews too :-)
- locknitpicker 1y ago> 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.
- isodev 1y agoI 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.
- ACCount37 1y agoThe 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.
- gishh 1y agoWhatever right to privacy that may exist goes out the window when you’re posting on the World Wide Web.
- isodev 1y agoOn 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.
- sigwinch 1y agoWell, I want logins everywhere. I’d like comments made with mTLS to sort to the top. Maybe just comments with mTLS signed by FSF.
- isodev 1y agoWell good, there is a place for you. But going down that road, it means at some point someone will say mTLS is bad because whatever (just like VPNs... and anonymous logins) ... and there won't be signed comments for you anymore, because Elon isn't in the mood for it.
- gishh 1y agoThe World Wide Web is not even close to anonymous by default. You selling whatever you’re on?
- sigwinch 1y ago
- ChocolateGod 1y agoX 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.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoX'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.
- orwin 1y agoI know someone from Greece (then Malta) who produce ragebait/troll article farms since at least 2015, targeting the US in general, republicans in particular (I think he started "both side", but Republican ragebait used to draw more engagement). I don't know what he's doing now, but from 2015 to 2020, he made millions. It was mostly facebook at the time, but i wouldn't surprise his content is trending on X.
- jofzar 1y agoI'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.
- lpapez 1y agoSlowly but surely turning into 4chan /pol/, now with country flags too!
- webdevver 1y agothat happened like 3 years ago THOUGH
- jmclnx 1y agoI 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.
- ACCount37 1y agoWebsites 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.
- jschoe 1y agoSelf-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.
- ritcgab 1y agoThere 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.
- xrmagnum 1y agoHosting your VPN is a fair bit of work. Plus, you need residential IP too which you don't really have if you host on any Cloud Provider. I had the same issue and decided to build TunnelBuddy.net so that a friend can share their internet connection with me or vice versa. It is entirely P2P and requires no sign up, no credit card. You download the app, share a code and that's it. It is like TeamViewer, but instead of sharing your screen you share your Internet Connection.
- cluckindan 1y agoThis is a good thing. Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-influencers-accidentally-unmasked-as-foreign-actors/ 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.”
- amriksohata 1y agoDo you think this wouldnt be happening on both sides of the political spectrum?
- isodev 1y agoIt'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.
- cluckindan 1y agoIf it’s not a lot of effort, why aren’t they already doing that?
- amelius 1y agoCat and mouse, the next step.
- Levitz 1y agoBecause 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.
- isodev 1y agoVPNs 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).
- TruffleLabs 1y ago"“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.
- locknitpicker 1y ago> 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 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.
- singpolyma3 1y agoThis is a dick move, but let's not present VPNs add much in the way of privacy or security on average.
- sigwinch 1y agoIt’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.
- DarkmSparks 1y agowill 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.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoMy 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.
- sigwinch 1y agoI suppose this could target people who use DNS other than, say, the biggest ten.
- rvz 1y agoThis 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/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- CommanderData 1y agoWasn't there something about DHS's account originating in Israel? Suprised it's not being discussed here.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- IAmGraydon 1y agoThat 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_official_department_of_homeland_security/ https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1p4i95z/the_off...
- exogenousdata 1y agoIn 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.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoToo bad. Social media has been turned against the US for too long by foreign adversaries. This will help end it.
- incomingpain 1y agoThe majority of my follows and the algo forced accounts really doesnt matter where they are. The cases where their location does matter, there wasnt a question as to where they were from. There were virtually no surprises from my point of view.