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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

• 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
      Feature is online for me now. Maybe A/B test, or incomplete rollout?
  • agentifysh 11mo ago
    I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention? I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
    • SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
      >I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon Hmm, interesting insight, what did they each say when you talked to them?
    • ceejayoz 11mo ago
      > I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged… One side has largely left X.
      • pseudo0 11mo ago
        The stats don't bear that out. Bluesky has been losing momentum since the election, with its DAU dropping from around 3.5 million to under 1.5 million today. For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. Right-wing alternative platforms had similar issues sustaining momentum, despite a much stronger push factor (right-wing people kept getting banned). It's hard to overcome the power of Twitter's network effect. https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
        • ceejayoz 11mo ago
          > For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. We're on a thread about widespread fake/inauthentic users on Twitter right now. I see very little reason to trust those numbers.
          • 11mo ago
  • bpodgursky 11mo ago
    It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
    • p1necone 11mo ago
      Sounds like this will stay useful for like a few days at best until these accounts work out what VPN to use to spoof the location properly.
    • embedding-shape 11mo ago
      I'm seeing two locations fields, current country and what country's appstore they first signed up with, it any, otherwise it says "web".
  • energy123 11mo ago
    It's less about political leanings and more about profits. There's a reason Jack Dorsey didn't do this, or FB or Reddit.
    • awesome_dude 11mo ago
      And why IRC went from default showing IP information to cloaking
      • Zak 11mo ago
        I think that's mostly to do with script kiddies trying to DoS anyone they disagreed with.
        • mlrtime 11mo ago
          Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Anyone remember WinNuke?
      • mschuster91 11mo ago
        That was and still is a choice of the user. The problem with not using a cloak was that you'd stand a very real chance of getting DDoS'd or, worse, outright hacked (made easier by the fact that in ye olde modem days, your computer was directly exposed to the Internet with no firewall/NAT to protect you), and even with using a cloak and a NAT router you'd still have trolls sending "DCC SEND" [1] into channels, immediately yeeting a bunch of people with old shoddy middleboxes. [1] https://nullroute.lt/~grawity/startkeylogger.html https://nullroute.lt/~grawity/startkeylogger.html
        • awesome_dude 11mo ago
          Libera has a policy of just handing them out (to anyone that registers) > Accounts registered after March 2024 that have a verified email address are automatically assigned a generic user cloak. If your account does not currently have a cloak, you may contact staff to receive one. https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks
  • api 11mo ago
    I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.
    • lazide 11mo ago
      When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like. And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.
      • api 11mo ago
        Good point. The same thing happens to heads of state. Putin thought he could take Ukraine in a few weeks because he is surrounded by yes men.
        • smnthermes 11mo ago
          If Putin was that stupid, he'd already have been ousted.
          • lazide 11mo ago
            The beauty of being rich/powerful enough is that when the yes man turns out to be wrong, you can throw them into the meat grinder too. Do it enough times, and you end up with yes men that also force other people into the meat grinder well enough you don’t have to care, directly. It’s a type of genius. It works best when you embrace that everyone wants to suck up to you anyway, and there are always more flunkies where they came from, so you’re really helping the world out by filtering down to the somewhat effective ones ASAP.
      • SmirkingRevenge 11mo ago
        The most valuable use case for AI might just be to roast billionaires surrounded by sycophants Instead they built better sycophants
  • p3rls 11mo ago
    [dead]
• embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > and it is curious as to why they rolled it back. I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user. Is it possible they enabled it back again?
• iamnothere 11mo ago
  > 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. I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow. If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion. Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
  • agentifysh 11mo ago
    wouldn't that happen with this too if you require people to sign up with their US passport because then now everything you type is going to have much more weight I guess facebook in a sense is already like this with all the verification required. the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off. this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling
    • iamnothere 11mo ago
      That’s why I think verification has to be done with an external service provider using an anonymized token, to verify is/is not citizen. It would have to be very clear that the social site does not have your identity. > the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off. The same would happen if people knew your IRL identity on a social site, see all the attempted “cancellations” on both sides of the aisle these last few years.
• Muromec 11mo ago
  If only there was some kind of PKI that could attest the identity of the person. It's a shame, that US doesn't have a government capable of running it.
• mjbale116 11mo ago
  All I want to know, is whether I am talking to an actual person. And I also want that person to have a single account, not multiple ones
• samrus 11mo ago
  It doesnt have to be US citizen only. It just has to be who they are claiming to be. If someone in india or europe wants to comment on foreign politics, thats fine. They just shouldnt be able to pretend they are from the US or anywhere else
  • Barrin92 11mo ago
    a town square isn't just a place, it's always a polity that requires common values and a shared culture. Otherwise you at best have an airport lobby. A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so. Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.
    • mschuster91 11mo ago
      > A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so. Upholding at least some utterly basic foundational values of humanity doesn't require holding any stake.
      • embedding-shape 11mo ago
        > utterly basic foundational values of humanity Except human across the planet doesn't even agree on those "foundational values". What seems obvious and fundamental to us, often isn't to others.
      • Steltek 11mo ago
        And if you're not interested in upholding basic values? What if you're looking to intentionally destroy things instead? Verified residency is better than nothing for putting real money on the table. Although if you've been to a local town meeting, you'll know it's still not perfect.
• 8note 11mo ago
  if a guy in india can make great MAGA posts, is that really a problem? its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it. id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good) is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.
  • mdhb 11mo ago
    With the exception of evangelical Christian’s where there’s obviously a huge amount of overlap I’ve never seen a group so eager to be lied to and so lacking in critical thinking as MAGA folks.
• JohnTHaller 11mo ago
  They rolled it back because the right-wing accounts that Musk et al had been boosting turned out to be foreign actors.