from the it's-almost-as-if-there-are-some-bad-actors-online dept

For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior—particularly foreign influence operations. They’ve insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is actually just “censorship” with various forms of cover, whether academic or operational.

Then Elon Musk rolled out a feature often used by trust & safety teams internally, looking at where accounts were created and/or where they normally post from. Except Musk made the info public. And within hours it revealed exactly why platforms had been doing this kind of work internally in the first place.

And, no, it wasn’t about “censorship” of ideological viewpoints.

On Friday, X began rolling out a feature that revealed where users signed up from and where they were posting from. The feature came following the request of MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who asked Musk back in September to add country-of-origin labels to help identify foreign influence operations. We noted the irony at the time—Loomer and her friends spent years attacking the trust & safety teams who were actually working on this problem.

Whether it was because of Loomer’s request or it was already in the pipeline, Musk rolled it out.

And, within hours, the feature revealed that a ton of super popular “MAGA” accounts were actually posting from all over the globe, with large numbers posting from Eastern Europe, West Africa, or Southeast Asia.

Almost immediately after the feature launched, people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on US politics appeared to be based outside of the US. Profiles with names like ULTRAMAGA🇺🇸TRUMP🇺🇸2028 were revealed to be based in Nigeria. A verified account posing as border czar Tom Homan was traced to Eastern Europe. And America_First0? Apparently from Bangladesh. An entire network of “Trump-supporting independent women” claiming to be from America was really located in Thailand.

The scale of the problem isn’t just about foreign actors exploiting the platform—it’s about Musk creating the economic incentives that make it profitable. As the popular Derek Guy account noted, Musk instituted an “engagement-based” payment structure that pays out money based on how many views, retweets, and comments you get. For people in lower income regions, trolling on politically sensitive topics in America to generate likes and clicks (especially now that they can use AI to do so) isn’t just easy—it’s an actual business model that Musk built into the platform.

This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature Musk designed, then acted surprised when it attracted exactly the kind of behavior that trust & safety teams used to work to identify and limit.

While it’s fascinating that X actually rolled this out, it should raise questions about those who have spent the past few years stewing in that cesspool of foreign rage-bait manipulation, insisting it was somehow an accurate portrayal of public opinion.

Now, there are some limitations to the system. X’s head of product noted that uses of VPNs or Starlink may have the wrong country show up on their account. But VPN usage doesn’t explain accounts with thousands of posts over months, all originating from the same foreign location, all focused on American political rage-bait, all monetizing engagement through Musk’s payment system.

This is exactly the kind of coordinated inauthentic behavior that trust & safety teams were built to identify and address. Not to “censor” ideological viewpoints, but to surface when what looks like organic American political discourse is actually foreign actors gaming the system for profit.

For years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have insisted that anyone working on these problems was part of a “censorship industrial complex” designed to silence political speech. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan repeated these lies. They treated trust & safety work as a threat to democracy itself.

Then Musk rolled out one basic feature, and within hours proved exactly why trust & safety work existed in the first place.

Will Taibbi or Shellenberger acknowledge they spent years attacking the people who were actually trying to protect the integrity of online discourse? Will they admit they helped dismantle the very systems that could have prevented what Musk just exposed?

I doubt it. They’re too busy on X, swimming in the very manipulation they insisted didn’t exist.

Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, foreign influence, foreign influence operations, trust & safety
Companies: twitter, x