4 ms·
Absolutely wild that this isn't bigger news. This should be the front page of every major news network.
by jrm4 11mo ago
Absolutely wild that this isn't bigger news. This should be the front page of every major news network.
- chneu 11mo agoMost of this, to some degree, has been well established for a while. American Republicans have relied heavily on foreign interference to achieve their goals. From social media manipulation to laundering illegal political bribes, Republicans have been doing it.
- jrm4 11mo ago100%, but the clear proof afforded by Elon should be the opportunity to really put it out there.
- phantasmish 11mo agoIt’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.
- hbosch 11mo ago[flagged]
- harrisonjackson 11mo agohttps://x.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743?s=20 https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743?s=20 > This is fake news. Location was not available on any gray check account at any point. Furthermore, the DHS has only shown IPs from the United States since account creation. - head of product @x Not to discount the impact of foreign powers over social media but maybe don't spread this misinformation.
- hbosch 11mo agoDoes this make the fact that it showed as Israel, was disabled, and is now "corrected", mean that this feature is good or bad? Either we can trust all location data all the time, or we can trust none of it. We cannot expect Nikita Bier to swoop in on every suspicious tweet and try to educate us on IP range changes and DNS glitches or whatever. Furthermore is it more likely that a small set of special accounts seemingly never collected location data on signup, or that for a small number of accounts X simply modified that data post-hoc?
- MayeulC 11mo ago> the fact that it showed as Israel Please re-read. That never happened.
- hbosch 11mo agoIt may have happened. There are already many users saying their "created in" locations were incorrect. Thus the rest of my comment: trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct You’re mixing up trust and faith.
- blitzar 11mo agoBlink twice if you are in danger.
- redindian75 11mo agoafter it was reported/recorded, X "fixed" it by making .gov accounts untrackable. So now it doesnt show Israel anymore (and MAGA accounts now have an opportunity to scream fake news)
- Aarostotle 11mo agoGiven the sibling comment here, I am wondering if you’ve fallen for a fake screenshot. I hope you did not make this up.
- jsheard 11mo agoYeah that DHS screenshot is fake. If you boost the exposure there's conspicuous gaps in the JPEG artifacts around the fields where they were edited. They would have got away with it if they just used Inspect Element!
- HaZeust 11mo agoAre you sure? https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1992314672436175055 https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1992314672436175055 --- Head of Product at X also changed narratives in real-time, going from "this was never shown" for gray accounts like the DHS', to saying the feature was disabled due to incorrect information from IP ranges changing over time - when you're literally just checking their first IP check-in: https://x.com/lporiginalg/status/1992385445024665655 https://x.com/lporiginalg/status/1992385445024665655 --- And there was, to everyone's credit, DOZENS of X threads of people torture-testing their browser recordings to confirm whether the information was legit or not: https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/1992331293212963080 https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/1992331293212963080 --- Make your own decisions, but that's what I took from the situation.
- jsheard 11mo ago> Are you sure? I'm sure that the screenshot going around shows signs of being edited, I checked that myself. For the rest, I have no idea. https://postimg.cc/gngQL6BY https://postimg.cc/gngQL6BY
- HaZeust 11mo agoMaybe THAT screenshot was, but it's not looking good that the information in that screenshot (doctored or not) wasn't exposed. Also fotoforensics is irrelevant, take a screenshot of an X account's information and you see those black bars. Why would they doctor the "@DHSgov" username otherwise lol?
- morkalork 11mo agoThere was that whole Russian operation paying blogs, influencers and other alt-media personalities in the run up to the election that was investigated. Nothing came of it and no one cared. I lost all faith in anyone being reasonable at that point. People want to hear what they want to hear, you can tell about how it's a psyops all you want, they still don't care.
- dstroot 11mo agoThey (major news networks) are owned by Trump friendlies (Bezos/WaPo, Soon-Shiong/LAT, etc.) or they are afraid of Trump’s influence.
- mschuster91 11mo agoDon't know why you're being downvoted. Ever since Trump first silenced critics by abusing the authority of his office (or threatening to do so), it is painfully obvious how many large media houses shy away from all-too-blatant reporting.
- inglor_cz 11mo agoIf MAGA does not care, Trump won't care either, and I cannot imagine MAGA caring.
- yetihehe 11mo agoNo one likes to be the bad messenger saying to Americans that they were fooled and all that hatred against their opponents (opposite party) was actually induced, not born out of their own superiority.
- numpad0 11mo agoMusk's like a transparent kid these days. Anything he touches seem to disappear from media - there is such thing as bad publicity after all, I guess.
- postflopclarity 11mo agoI mean it's been pretty obvious for a while... the people who would care already knew about this. the people who didn't know about this don't care (or are in denial).
- an0malous 11mo agoIt’s going to get flagged off of HN front page within the hour like it did the last two times someone posted about it
- ALittleSlow 11mo agoTall tale signs of a foreign influence campaign cover up, watch your 6
- yetihehe 11mo agoIt already disappeared from front page. Your comment was 45 minutes old when I was writing this.
- jorisboris 11mo agoWhy, does it breach any rules?
- an0malous 11mo agoIt doesn't violate any rules as far as I can tell. Why do certain topics get predictably flagged when they don't breach any rules? I don't know, that's a good question for the admins
- cosmicgadget 11mo agoNo, people use flagging when it disagrees with their political perspective. They show up on the post to say so, too.
- lesuorac 11mo agoWhy? Govs doing influence campaigns was admitted during the twitter files [1]. While it's the US-relationship, Twitter is a global company so they're going to have other country relationships. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._8%E2%80%939:_Relationship_with_the_U.S._government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._8%E2%80%939...
- simonw 11mo agoI doubt most of this is foreign government influence campaigns. I think it's more that Twitter will pay you to post clickbait, and if you are in Africa or many parts of Asia the amount you can earn is significant. There was some great reporting about Macedonian teenagers doing this kind of thing back in 2016 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian-teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma... - it was actually the origin of the term "fake news" before Trump redefined it to mean any mainstream media coverage that he didn't like.
- epistasis 11mo agoFirst, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before, it was just a PR campaign for Musk to try to lessen trust among the populace. Second, this is about foreign influence driving a lot of the self-destructive politics in the US. Right now the US is going through economic and political destruction a lot like Brexit, and it should be no surprise that it's being lead by those outside of the US who want to make the US weaker.
- lesuorac 11mo ago> First, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before My guy, there's like 40 words between my post and the source try reading them. They were doing influence campaigns ... > [1] documents that showed the Twitter Site Integrity Team whitelisted accounts from United States Central Command (CENTCOM) used to run online influence campaigns in other countries
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> wild that this isn't bigger news Give it time. So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations. We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample. It may be individual profiteers. It could be one, or multiple, coördinated campaigns. X may be complicit or clueless. I’d be surprised if serious journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to need to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications. (That said, the premise is incorrect. In limited cases, it’s gaining traction [1].) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-...
- Fricken 11mo agoWe've known of foreign influence campaigns targeting Americans on social media for a long time. A significant number of HN users have a vested interest in pretending it isn't the case. Some of them are making money off it. Others are too proud to entertain the notion that they might be the gullible victims of rage-bait and disinformation. Posts on the subject usually gets flagged pretty quick, but it's getting harder to ignore the truth.
- NuclearPM 11mo agoHard to compete with leaders being accused of raping, corruption, and and calling for execution of political opponents for newsworthiness.
- rtkwe 11mo agoIt's been known for a while this is just verification. Accounts give themselves away all the time accidentally through phrases or tells. eg: A tweet from an account claiming to be from the US talking about Texas succession that mentions 'warm water ports', very few people care or think about that because all the ports on the continental US don't freeze over in the winter. (In fact very few countries do because most have as many warm water ports as they need, one of the few with significant issues with this is... Russia)
- quickthrowman 11mo agoThe easiest one to spot is a lack of articles. A distinct lack of ‘the’ and ‘a’ in a sample of written English means the writer’s native language lacks articles. Like Finnish, or… Russian.
- overrun11 11mo agoThat people from third world countries are making slop political accounts to make money? Hardly a news story at all
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- specialist 11mo agoNo surprise to us geeks, of course. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" and all that. The big surprise (disappointment) to me was witnessing how "do your own research" looks in practice. - Type in some search terms. - Open handful of the top hits. - Believe everything. - Even the obvious scams & ads. There's something about media that bypasses most adult's innate skepticism. Like if I told some stranger (IRL) that saffron cures baldness, they'd be all GTFO. But hear it from a talk show host or read it on Facebook, well shit, it must be true.
- hn1986 11mo agothis isn't surprising. as the article mentions, this has been going on since at least 2016. You can expect influence campaigns to be on every social network and comment section. The problem is that these companies do nothing about this.
- tstrimple 11mo agoIt was widely reported that right wing influencers were being directly paid by Russia for their disinformation. People like Tim Poole were demonstrated to be on the Russian payroll but nothing ever came from it because conservatives don't care. They have no real values or beliefs other than winning and making people they don't like suffer. The "moderates" are too busy trying to decide what the right compromise between fascism and freedom are. The liberals are too busy trying to find their next way to punch left while platforming fascists as allies.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]