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X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

557 points by ourmandave 11mo ago

nextworddev 11mo ago
HN also needs this feature
protocolture 11mo ago
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.
- andybak 11mo ago
  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)
  - tormeh 11mo ago
    "It's all fake?" "Always has been"
  - ninkendo 11mo ago
    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.
    - mlrtime 11mo ago
      Reddit even more so, thats why you see these 'touch grass' comments littered around.
  - FloorEgg 11mo ago
    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).
    - CalChris 11mo ago
      > 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.
      - FloorEgg 11mo ago
        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.
        CalChris 11mo ago
        A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison It was discussed a month or so back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
  - TJSomething 11mo ago
    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.
    - pixl97 11mo ago
      Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
    - thrance 11mo ago
      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.
  - BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
    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.
- mock-possum 11mo ago
  This is my sentiment exactly, and you put it a lot more succinctly than I was thinking.
- pfannkuchen 11mo ago
  You’re talking about public school, right?
  - ragazzina 11mo ago
    What did you learn in school that was actually fake?
    - pfannkuchen 11mo ago
      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.
      - davkan 11mo ago
        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?
        pfannkuchen 11mo ago
        I’m not contrasting with private schools, I’m just not sure 100% of private schools do this so I focused on what I know. It’s kind of funny how everyone projects their own dialectic framing on statements, and assumes that a person opposing side A automatically supports whatever is side B in their own mind.
        davkan 11mo ago
        Yes everyone does do that. Most people will not take a tangential single sentence criticism of an institution to mean that you hold none of the typical accompanying political views and are just narrowly opining on your experience. I would imagine a large majority of readers read your original post and immediately in their head thought, “are they one of those school voucher people” or something along those lines.
- parineum 11mo ago
  > Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake. The shadows on the wall aren't fake, they are just... shadows of real things. Plato's cave is about having an incomplete view of reality, not a false view of reality.
tehjoker 11mo ago
is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country
- wnevets 11mo ago
  > is there any technical reason why with the development capability remaining at twitter anything is possible.
- intothemild 11mo ago
  Because they're all from other countries. It's really not that deep
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
    - happosai 11mo ago
      To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
      - prmph 11mo ago
        Why would people stop using sites that continually provide them a daily dose of righteous anger, making their dreary lives a bit more meaningful?
      - pixl97 11mo ago
        This video will make you angry is 10 years old now. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc Anger works wonders online.
  - 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
agentifysh 11mo ago
X obviously isn't the only platform where this is taking place and it is curious as to why they rolled it back. how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
- tracerbulletx 11mo ago
  The propaganda apparatus will adapt if that becomes common so its not a permanent solution but it's nice for now.
  - Barbing 11mo ago
    Yar. I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera. Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder. (Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
- p1necone 11mo ago
  I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
  - abirch 11mo ago
    Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
    - marginalia_nu 11mo ago
bparsons 11mo ago
It truly is the sewer of the internet.
- seizethecheese 11mo ago
  You think this is unique to X? If anything, it’s unique they’re exposing this.
  - tasty_freeze 11mo ago
    "exposing" should have been past tense. They've quickly reverted that feature once they realized how bad it made them look.
  - anigbrowl 11mo ago
    When the API was public academics and independent scholars used to do this sort of research all the time, but now it's prohibitively expensive. Read up on the search/streaming API and reflect on the fact that it used to be free.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
  Are you trying to make sure that any criticism of X can be shrugged off by supporters and detractors alike as cheap ideological attacks? Because if you are, excellent job.
- ecoled_ame 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - malfist 11mo ago
    Sorry to break it to you bud, but girls on the internet aren't usually girls in real life.
    - ecoled_ame 11mo ago
      You don’t think girls use the internet? I’ve met some in real life, know a bunch who clearly aren’t fake. That’s why they hang out on twitter. Places like HackerNews are cool for guys, but not fun. Twitter may be chaotic, but it’s fun for girls and many feel comfortable there. They can post stuff, kind of like pinterest.
Zigurd 11mo ago
This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.
- anonymars 11mo ago
  Indeed. Can I interest you in the good old USA project? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-covert-russian-government-sponsored-foreign-malign-influence https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d... See exhibit 8 and such: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl Or 10 which specifically talks about Twitter https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl
  - lurk2 11mo ago
    Interesting read. Thank you for sharing. Was there ever any evidence that they hit their projected metrics? A million followers after a year seems ambitious.
- lurk2 11mo ago
  > This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.
  - energy123 11mo ago
    Russia hires people in Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-uncovers-russian-led-troll-network-based-in-west-africa https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
BhavdeepSethi 11mo ago
First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.
- iamshs 11mo ago
  After this change, accounts created in US will be sought after. Operate them through a US VPN. Voracious appetite for consuming content will be filled by outsiders. US effs up the world with violence, now world is riling up Americans with similarly worded content of their own politicians.
duxup 11mo ago
I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...
- ebbi 11mo ago
  My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately. And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber. It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
  - JoshTriplett 11mo ago
    > My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately. Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step. These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
    - awesome_dude 11mo ago
      I think that almost every platform has gone through a period where the latest breaking news was being published.. as it happened IRC Usenet Reddit Facebook (live) Twitter
      - ok123456 11mo ago
        IRC is fine.
      - quickthrowman 11mo ago
        There was a period of time when it was ‘random phpBB forums’ too, 2000 to 2006 or so?
lateforwork 11mo ago
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.
- inesranzo 11mo ago
  Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.
  - lateforwork 11mo ago
    Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
- ebbi 11mo ago
  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.
  - lateforwork 11mo ago
    You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
    - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
      You can but a lot of people use their phone and the official apps. It also shows if you primarily use a browser. :)
  - hypeatei 11mo ago
    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.
iamshs 11mo ago
Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
mac-attack 11mo ago
America outsourcing its rage is peak USA. McKinsey would be proud
- energy123 11mo ago
  Even their political commentary is an entertainment export.
- AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
  I think it's more like outsiders stoking US rage on both sides. That's a bit different than "outsourcing".
  - ants_everywhere 11mo ago
    Yeah, rage isn't something the US needs. It's something the US's enemies need us to have.
- cortesoft 11mo ago
  It's not the USA outsourcing rage, it is foreign actors paying to manufacture rage in the USA.
  - wolrah 11mo ago
    whynotboth.gif I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.
    - spprashant 11mo ago
      Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
    - cortesoft 11mo ago
comeonbro 11mo ago
It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.
- sire404 11mo ago
  There were multiple accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. One with 1M.
  - NaomiLehman 11mo ago
    yeah but barely any engagement
lurk2 11mo ago
Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other). Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.
- churchill 11mo ago
  [dead]
- throwaway48476 11mo ago
  Indians pretend to be Israelis because they don't like Muslims who they see as similar to Pakistanis.
- stefan_ 11mo ago
  Where are all these Israeli accounts? That just seems to be your weird personal bias. Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now!
  - albedoa 11mo ago
    > Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now! That is exactly what is happening and what is being reported on. The thing you attribute to "weird personal bias" is being widely exposed. We should probably examine your weird personal bias. Weird, because you could just read the article!
  - lurk2 11mo ago
    > Where are all these Israeli accounts? The Department of Homeland Security, for one. Edit: Link removed as I was disinformed by a /pol/ PsyOp.
    - 11mo ago
rguiscard 11mo ago
This reminds me of WeChat doing similar things a few years ago: Tencent's WeChat to reveal user locations on public account posts. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-user-locations-platform-posts-2022-04-29/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-us...
- est 11mo ago
  Wechat does not reveal "user location", it only applies to "public account". It's not what you'd imagine for an "account", it's more like an "news feed" where org can publish articles. However if you comment on those articles, your provincial location would be attached. the Cyber Admin of CCP mandates every app to reveal the provincial location for author and commenter.
  - sunaookami 11mo ago
    It does for other social networks like Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu though, you can see the location of the user (province-level for China, country-level for anyone else) on their profile.
mcintyre1994 11mo ago
I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.
ecoled_ame 11mo ago
[flagged]
ch2026 11mo ago
every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
- throwaway48476 11mo ago
  Niche subjects are much nicer because there's often no incentive to manipulate.
  - NaomiLehman 11mo ago
    there is a big incentive to manipulate HN though. it's not so niche either. lobste.rs is niche
    - throwaway48476 11mo ago
      If you're discussing products sure. But what incentive is there to manipulate discussing the rust language? It's free.
  - mlrtime 11mo ago
    Anything to do with money being made will have manipulation, niche or not.
ro_bit 11mo ago
Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1 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
- Lammy 11mo ago
  > 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 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
- jsheard 11mo ago
  Did they edit it? I stepped forward a few years and it's still there. https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit... Funny nonetheless though.
- DustinEchoes 11mo ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383
- dialup_sounds 11mo ago
  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.
  - tracerbulletx 11mo ago
    I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.
afavour 11mo ago
People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea. If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?
- rzerowan 11mo ago
  To add to this , twitters algo seems primed to amplify controvesial topics to boost engagements.Why some topics always seemsto keep getting boosted while others barely trend. Which for many enterprising trolls/grifter have seen them become SEO(TEO?) experts to push their preferred narratives for clout/profit while drowning the entire timelines in a flood of noise.
- 8note 11mo ago
  yeah, id reasonably describe the results as a list of locations where the couple bucks that twitter will pay is enough to get by. for canada though, id like to see the CBC dedicatedly paying canadians to post canadian perspectives on social media
- sunaookami 11mo ago
  Reminds me of a japanese news article about that topic where they exposed some of these accounts - these are mostly from India and other poor countries were posting fake engagement makes them a LOT more money than any other job. In this case there were some accounts that searched for Japanese earthquake news and posted condolences etc to drive up their numbers (this was after the 2023 Noto earthquake).
  - p3rls 11mo ago
    [dead]
mise_en_place 11mo ago
Their humiliation ritual is just beginning.
- cindyllm 11mo ago
  [dead]
blargey 11mo ago
And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance. Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
thomassmith65 11mo ago
While the location now shows US, X notes that the account location might not be accurate due to use of VPN Just 'now'... not when signing up for their account? It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
bdangubic 11mo ago
if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )
rzerowan 11mo ago
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change. IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away. Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
- bawolff 11mo ago
  I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.
  - SmirkingRevenge 11mo ago
    You can definitely buy cellphone location data but afaik it's anonymized with an mobile identification #. But there may be ways to link those records to a platform's users
jaco6 11mo ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
Related: X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417 Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211
DustinEchoes 11mo ago
This is happening all over US social media, even here. If you ever wonder why US hatred has permeated modern culture, this is why.
xorvoid 11mo ago
I'm amused this is a new reveal for some people. Seemed the very likely case for me.
rurban 11mo ago
Google always thinks I am in Finland, because one of my coworkers on the same VPN is in Finland. Bonkers. Finish ads suck
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
Meekro 11mo ago
Worth noting that these foreign accounts are pretty small. The biggest foreign pro-MAGA account mentioned in the article is "MAGA NATION" with ~400k subs, with the others being in the 10k-100k subs range. Contrast that with legit pro-rightwing accounts: @tuckercarlson (17M), @benshapiro (8M), @RealCandaceO (7.5M), @jordanbpeterson (6M), @catturd2 (4M), @libsoftiktok (4.5M), @seanhannity (7M).
- majani 11mo ago
  Color me shocked that libsoftiktok is an actual US account. I was certain it was a foreign operative
  - Meekro 11mo ago
    Guessing you don't follow politics much? The owner of that account is an American woman, her identity actually leaked years ago. She's sat for several in-person interviews, I think.
amai 11mo ago
Thank godness this feature doesn‘t exist on hackernews.
- OrangeMusic 11mo ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - amai 11mo ago
    Without that feature foreign influence on hacker news stays hidden.
maxlin 11mo ago
Can't beat X. Such a great feature to see which accounts might be trying to astroturf. Already accounts like Republicans For Trump, and several (mostly no-name) US flag -toting accounts were exposed for not even being based in the US. Now if we could have other platforms do the same, and not just accidentally like with the Reddit case lol
- anigbrowl 11mo ago
  This information has always been available in the API, but Musk shut down free access to the API shortly after buying it, erecting a $5000/mo paywall. You can still use it to post, but not for serach or any kind of streaming without paying a fat fee.
kazinator 11mo ago
I don't use X. If I made an X account while vacationing in a foreign country, would that then be my country-of-origin for that account, even upon continuing to use X after returning home? Or is it based on the IP address of last interaction?
noirchen 11mo ago
There once were news about Fitbit or Garmin displaying workout records for users near classified military bases, and some workout routes were suspected to be in the playground of the bases.
Slava_Propanei 11mo ago
[dead]
tb_technical 11mo ago
It's wild to me that the DHS account was created in Tel Aviv. Several American nationalists are Indian. It's absolutely nuts.

557 points by ourmandave 11mo ago

HN also needs this feature

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.

andybak 11mo ago
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)
- tormeh 11mo ago
  "It's all fake?" "Always has been"
- ninkendo 11mo ago
  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.
  - mlrtime 11mo ago
    Reddit even more so, thats why you see these 'touch grass' comments littered around.
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  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).
  - CalChris 11mo ago
    > 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.
    - FloorEgg 11mo ago
      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.
      - CalChris 11mo ago
        A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison It was discussed a month or so back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
- TJSomething 11mo ago
  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.
  - pixl97 11mo ago
    Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
  - thrance 11mo ago
    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.
- BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
  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.
mock-possum 11mo ago
This is my sentiment exactly, and you put it a lot more succinctly than I was thinking.
pfannkuchen 11mo ago
You’re talking about public school, right?
- ragazzina 11mo ago
  What did you learn in school that was actually fake?
  - pfannkuchen 11mo ago
    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.
    - davkan 11mo ago
      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?
      - pfannkuchen 11mo ago
        I’m not contrasting with private schools, I’m just not sure 100% of private schools do this so I focused on what I know. It’s kind of funny how everyone projects their own dialectic framing on statements, and assumes that a person opposing side A automatically supports whatever is side B in their own mind.
        davkan 11mo ago
        Yes everyone does do that. Most people will not take a tangential single sentence criticism of an institution to mean that you hold none of the typical accompanying political views and are just narrowly opining on your experience. I would imagine a large majority of readers read your original post and immediately in their head thought, “are they one of those school voucher people” or something along those lines.
parineum 11mo ago
> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake. The shadows on the wall aren't fake, they are just... shadows of real things. Plato's cave is about having an incomplete view of reality, not a false view of reality.

tehjoker 11mo ago

is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country

wnevets 11mo ago
> is there any technical reason why with the development capability remaining at twitter anything is possible.
intothemild 11mo ago
Because they're all from other countries. It's really not that deep
- jsheard 11mo ago
  Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
  - happosai 11mo ago
    To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
    - prmph 11mo ago
      Why would people stop using sites that continually provide them a daily dose of righteous anger, making their dreary lives a bit more meaningful?
    - pixl97 11mo ago
      This video will make you angry is 10 years old now. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc Anger works wonders online.
- 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

agentifysh 11mo ago

X obviously isn't the only platform where this is taking place and it is curious as to why they rolled it back. how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.

tracerbulletx 11mo ago
The propaganda apparatus will adapt if that becomes common so its not a permanent solution but it's nice for now.
- Barbing 11mo ago
  Yar. I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera. Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder. (Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
p1necone 11mo ago
I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
- abirch 11mo ago
  Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
  - marginalia_nu 11mo ago

bparsons 11mo ago

It truly is the sewer of the internet.

seizethecheese 11mo ago
You think this is unique to X? If anything, it’s unique they’re exposing this.
- tasty_freeze 11mo ago
  "exposing" should have been past tense. They've quickly reverted that feature once they realized how bad it made them look.
- anigbrowl 11mo ago
  When the API was public academics and independent scholars used to do this sort of research all the time, but now it's prohibitively expensive. Read up on the search/streaming API and reflect on the fact that it used to be free.
SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
Are you trying to make sure that any criticism of X can be shrugged off by supporters and detractors alike as cheap ideological attacks? Because if you are, excellent job.
ecoled_ame 11mo ago
[flagged]
- malfist 11mo ago
  Sorry to break it to you bud, but girls on the internet aren't usually girls in real life.
  - ecoled_ame 11mo ago
    You don’t think girls use the internet? I’ve met some in real life, know a bunch who clearly aren’t fake. That’s why they hang out on twitter. Places like HackerNews are cool for guys, but not fun. Twitter may be chaotic, but it’s fun for girls and many feel comfortable there. They can post stuff, kind of like pinterest.

Zigurd 11mo ago

This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.

anonymars 11mo ago
Indeed. Can I interest you in the good old USA project? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-covert-russian-government-sponsored-foreign-malign-influence https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d... See exhibit 8 and such: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl Or 10 which specifically talks about Twitter https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl
- lurk2 11mo ago
  Interesting read. Thank you for sharing. Was there ever any evidence that they hit their projected metrics? A million followers after a year seems ambitious.
lurk2 11mo ago
> This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.
- energy123 11mo ago
  Russia hires people in Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-uncovers-russian-led-troll-network-based-in-west-africa https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...

BhavdeepSethi 11mo ago

First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.

iamshs 11mo ago
After this change, accounts created in US will be sought after. Operate them through a US VPN. Voracious appetite for consuming content will be filled by outsiders. US effs up the world with violence, now world is riling up Americans with similarly worded content of their own politicians.

duxup 11mo ago

I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...

ebbi 11mo ago
My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately. And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber. It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
- JoshTriplett 11mo ago
  > My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately. Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step. These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
  - awesome_dude 11mo ago
    I think that almost every platform has gone through a period where the latest breaking news was being published.. as it happened IRC Usenet Reddit Facebook (live) Twitter
    - ok123456 11mo ago
      IRC is fine.
    - quickthrowman 11mo ago
      There was a period of time when it was ‘random phpBB forums’ too, 2000 to 2006 or so?

lateforwork 11mo ago

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.

inesranzo 11mo ago
Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.
- lateforwork 11mo ago
  Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
ebbi 11mo ago
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.
- lateforwork 11mo ago
  You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
  - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
    You can but a lot of people use their phone and the official apps. It also shows if you primarily use a browser. :)
- hypeatei 11mo ago
  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.

iamshs 11mo ago

Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...

mac-attack 11mo ago

America outsourcing its rage is peak USA. McKinsey would be proud

energy123 11mo ago
Even their political commentary is an entertainment export.
AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
I think it's more like outsiders stoking US rage on both sides. That's a bit different than "outsourcing".
- ants_everywhere 11mo ago
  Yeah, rage isn't something the US needs. It's something the US's enemies need us to have.
cortesoft 11mo ago
It's not the USA outsourcing rage, it is foreign actors paying to manufacture rage in the USA.
- wolrah 11mo ago
  whynotboth.gif I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.
  - spprashant 11mo ago
    Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
  - cortesoft 11mo ago

comeonbro 11mo ago

It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.

sire404 11mo ago
There were multiple accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. One with 1M.
- NaomiLehman 11mo ago
  yeah but barely any engagement

lurk2 11mo ago

Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other). Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.

churchill 11mo ago
[dead]
throwaway48476 11mo ago
Indians pretend to be Israelis because they don't like Muslims who they see as similar to Pakistanis.
stefan_ 11mo ago
Where are all these Israeli accounts? That just seems to be your weird personal bias. Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now!
- albedoa 11mo ago
  > Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now! That is exactly what is happening and what is being reported on. The thing you attribute to "weird personal bias" is being widely exposed. We should probably examine your weird personal bias. Weird, because you could just read the article!
- lurk2 11mo ago
  > Where are all these Israeli accounts? The Department of Homeland Security, for one. Edit: Link removed as I was disinformed by a /pol/ PsyOp.
  - 11mo ago

rguiscard 11mo ago

This reminds me of WeChat doing similar things a few years ago: Tencent's WeChat to reveal user locations on public account posts. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-user-locations-platform-posts-2022-04-29/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-us...

est 11mo ago
Wechat does not reveal "user location", it only applies to "public account". It's not what you'd imagine for an "account", it's more like an "news feed" where org can publish articles. However if you comment on those articles, your provincial location would be attached. the Cyber Admin of CCP mandates every app to reveal the provincial location for author and commenter.
- sunaookami 11mo ago
  It does for other social networks like Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu though, you can see the location of the user (province-level for China, country-level for anyone else) on their profile.

mcintyre1994 11mo ago

I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.

ecoled_ame 11mo ago

[flagged]

ch2026 11mo ago

every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.

throwaway48476 11mo ago
Niche subjects are much nicer because there's often no incentive to manipulate.
- NaomiLehman 11mo ago
  there is a big incentive to manipulate HN though. it's not so niche either. lobste.rs is niche
  - throwaway48476 11mo ago
    If you're discussing products sure. But what incentive is there to manipulate discussing the rust language? It's free.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  Anything to do with money being made will have manipulation, niche or not.

ro_bit 11mo ago

Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1 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

Lammy 11mo ago
> 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 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
jsheard 11mo ago
Did they edit it? I stepped forward a few years and it's still there. https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit... Funny nonetheless though.
DustinEchoes 11mo ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383
dialup_sounds 11mo ago
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.
- tracerbulletx 11mo ago
  I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.

afavour 11mo ago

People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea. If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?

rzerowan 11mo ago
To add to this , twitters algo seems primed to amplify controvesial topics to boost engagements.Why some topics always seemsto keep getting boosted while others barely trend. Which for many enterprising trolls/grifter have seen them become SEO(TEO?) experts to push their preferred narratives for clout/profit while drowning the entire timelines in a flood of noise.
8note 11mo ago
yeah, id reasonably describe the results as a list of locations where the couple bucks that twitter will pay is enough to get by. for canada though, id like to see the CBC dedicatedly paying canadians to post canadian perspectives on social media
sunaookami 11mo ago
Reminds me of a japanese news article about that topic where they exposed some of these accounts - these are mostly from India and other poor countries were posting fake engagement makes them a LOT more money than any other job. In this case there were some accounts that searched for Japanese earthquake news and posted condolences etc to drive up their numbers (this was after the 2023 Noto earthquake).
- p3rls 11mo ago
  [dead]

mise_en_place 11mo ago

Their humiliation ritual is just beginning.

cindyllm 11mo ago
[dead]

blargey 11mo ago

And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance. Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.

thomassmith65 11mo ago

While the location now shows US, X notes that the account location might not be accurate due to use of VPN Just 'now'... not when signing up for their account? It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

bdangubic 11mo ago

if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )

rzerowan 11mo ago

On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change. IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away. Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.

bawolff 11mo ago
I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.
- SmirkingRevenge 11mo ago
  You can definitely buy cellphone location data but afaik it's anonymized with an mobile identification #. But there may be ways to link those records to a platform's users

jaco6 11mo ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 11mo ago

Related: X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417 Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211

DustinEchoes 11mo ago

This is happening all over US social media, even here. If you ever wonder why US hatred has permeated modern culture, this is why.

xorvoid 11mo ago

I'm amused this is a new reveal for some people. Seemed the very likely case for me.

rurban 11mo ago

Google always thinks I am in Finland, because one of my coworkers on the same VPN is in Finland. Bonkers. Finish ads suck

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

Meekro 11mo ago

Worth noting that these foreign accounts are pretty small. The biggest foreign pro-MAGA account mentioned in the article is "MAGA NATION" with ~400k subs, with the others being in the 10k-100k subs range. Contrast that with legit pro-rightwing accounts: @tuckercarlson (17M), @benshapiro (8M), @RealCandaceO (7.5M), @jordanbpeterson (6M), @catturd2 (4M), @libsoftiktok (4.5M), @seanhannity (7M).

majani 11mo ago
Color me shocked that libsoftiktok is an actual US account. I was certain it was a foreign operative
- Meekro 11mo ago
  Guessing you don't follow politics much? The owner of that account is an American woman, her identity actually leaked years ago. She's sat for several in-person interviews, I think.

amai 11mo ago

Thank godness this feature doesn‘t exist on hackernews.

OrangeMusic 11mo ago
Care to elaborate?
- amai 11mo ago
  Without that feature foreign influence on hacker news stays hidden.

maxlin 11mo ago

Can't beat X. Such a great feature to see which accounts might be trying to astroturf. Already accounts like Republicans For Trump, and several (mostly no-name) US flag -toting accounts were exposed for not even being based in the US. Now if we could have other platforms do the same, and not just accidentally like with the Reddit case lol

anigbrowl 11mo ago
This information has always been available in the API, but Musk shut down free access to the API shortly after buying it, erecting a $5000/mo paywall. You can still use it to post, but not for serach or any kind of streaming without paying a fat fee.

kazinator 11mo ago

I don't use X. If I made an X account while vacationing in a foreign country, would that then be my country-of-origin for that account, even upon continuing to use X after returning home? Or is it based on the IP address of last interaction?

noirchen 11mo ago

There once were news about Fitbit or Garmin displaying workout records for users near classified military bases, and some workout routes were suspected to be in the playground of the bases.

Slava_Propanei 11mo ago

[dead]

tb_technical 11mo ago

It's wild to me that the DHS account was created in Tel Aviv. Several American nationalists are Indian. It's absolutely nuts.