The accounts being discussed here have pushed agendas within the US, and commented on US politics regularly. Many are also named to echo political movements, like some MAGA accounts.
However, these ‘political influencers’ have been found to be based outside the US, raising questions about the motives.
One profile going by ‘MAGA NATION’ with a follower count of over 392,000, is based out of eastern Europe. Similarly, ‘Dark Maga’ a page with over 15,000 followers is based out of Thailand. ‘MAGA Scope’ which boasts over 51,000 followers is actually operated out of Nigeria, and ‘America First’, an account with over 67,000 followers is based out of Bangladesh.
“At this time thousands of MAGA-aligned influencer accounts and large political pages that claim to be based in the U.S. are now being investigated and exposed with many of them traced to India, Nigeria, and other countries,” a news aggregator page on X noted.
Archive: https://archive.ph/DYs5O
“I hope that everyone sees, regardless of their specific reason, that the enemy is outside of the house. The people posing as Americans with big American opinions but are actually operating from a basement across the world have one common goal - to destroy the United States. We have our issues, but we really can’t allow them to succeed.”
Elon:
“Yeah, we’re just gonna turn that feature right back off here for a second…nothing to see, don’t worry about it.”
…Democratic cicles…
Proceeds to list 4 MAGA accounts
I’m not claiming that left leaving policics is immune to this but it feels like there are a lot more prolific right leaning ones.
The Fediverse needs to implement something like this. We already have a problem, and it is important to stop this before it gets worse.
It kinda already does. If you have your own instance you can see people’s IPs.
And what about VPNs?
Or what about rotating residential proxies?
If I want to, it’s not that hard to fake your location
The biggest point of this is that Twitter was so lazy that these guys didn’t even have to try to hide their location, so they didn’t and cut cost
That’s not the same as making them publicly visible.
I’m worried that the actors we most need to be worried about are more than able to hide their origin countries if they need to. I mean even I could do that if I wanted to.
I agree. If they want to expend the resources to manipulate public opinion then hiding their identity is not going to be a problem.
On the internet it has never made sense to take someone’s claimed location or identity as fact, it’s been that way for 25 or 30 years and I feel like I’m going insane seeing so many people apparently realize this for the first time.
Some might actually believe me when I say I am a cartoon dog.
Well, thats certainly helpful for every user who only interacts with an instance they run, and no other federated instances.
The shocking thing here is not that there are MAGA accounts from outside the US, but that twitter introduced a feature which would expose that
The MAGA followers are out of non-America. The Anti-MAGA leaders are out of non-America, or using a VPN.
Interesting.
It’s painfully obvious X is a cesspool of Muskbots and Russian seedbots accounts.
Odd that Xitter should be the dump that officially reveals this, as the reveal runs counter to their interests.
They need the faithful to get over this before the midterms, so it’s being revealed now. MAGA will be fine with this, as they are fine with anything that boosts their movement.
They just aren’t that smart, only evil and selfish
It is obvious that many of these accounts are bots or paid actors, but I wonder how much VPN usage has impacted these stats
I do find it strange that this is surprising to some.
It’s been pretty obvious to us external observers.
At the time, the bot accounts claim was always difficult to prove. There were mountains of anecdotal evidence but nothing concrete. Not anymore.
The thing that did it for me was several years ago when Russia disconnected the whole country from the Internet for a day and Reddit instantly transformed. Nearly all of the trolls in political threads disappeared, and discussions became nicer and way more the left-leaning.
Yes; as with so many revelations, the facts shouldn’t be surprising, but the evidence is actionable where the assumptions weren’t.
Instagram is just as bad. Some accounts make provocative comments but never reply. Looking at their profiles as well, they have little to no followers or no post at all. It’s like with Reddit in which accounts that are months or years old with no activity, and then suddenly become activated posting hateful single issues.
The intention is to divide the people so that powers-that-be hoodwink us while stealing from our pockets. Many of us know better that the posts are ragebaits. However, social media companies do nothing about bad faith actors because they benefit from angry discourse to inflate engagement and attention for more traffic and advertising. You wonder who are the people are surprised by this? It’s mainly those who don’t expand from their narrow experience and like digital brain rot contents.
The intention of foreign interference campaigns is to create unrest and distrust of institutions in the target country.
The intention is to divide the people so that powers-that-be hoodwink us while stealing from our pockets.
Ah so you’re doing that too.
So… what is your country of origin?
I guess I’m a little surprised at the diversity of where these pages are based, lmao. I thought it would be a lot more Russia, Israel.
Plenty of troll farms are in third world countries, which are paid by powerful state actors behind the scenes, exploiting the economic desperation of people from these countries. Last year’s country-wide anti-immigration riot in the UK started with a single post of a fake news, which has been traced to a user in Pakistan. The user was interviewed and said he was simply paid and didn’t think there will be profound consequences.
A lot of troll farms were raided during the Biden era. While it wasn’t enough to change the tide, I can imagine that combined with Russia’s war on Ukraine being a prime motivation for the administration’s interest in AI.
I think the geography is that of bot farms. The money comes from somewhere else. My guess it’s probably the same people you’d suspect, and they are not foreign. It’s the kind of people that would sell out their own country for a .5% reduction in their tax rate.
Was it just a meme I saw, or is the DHS account really based in Israel?
I’m not sure it’s a satire. The sign up date was 2008. Which only raises more questions.
Who says it isn’t? The geolocation only does the first hop. Of course, in the case of Nigeria, it’s organized crime running this with forced labor and being paid off by international interests to do it. It’s more profitable than nigerian prince scams.
They are the paymasters. But they can employ their workforce from all over the world.
I’m surprised it is getting caught by this feature. I thought routing those accounts through a US based connection was table stakes. But, I guess there is no point bothering until people actually are able to see.
392,000 people were tricked by a person who isn’t even smart enough to use a VPN.
Its generous to suggest 1 follower = 1 person
Oh no! If we only knew how to put up another message board. BBS anyone?
How is that message board going to be immune to this?
How long until he turns it off?
Pretty sure he already did based on other comments I’ve seen around other sites.
Well shucks.
Hopefully long enough for MAGA to question even a small portion of their existence
Sorry, but introspection is woke.
Remind me of this book I own
🤣
That is not really a thing MAGA does.
Russian majority I bet
Maga accounts need throw in trash 💻🗑️
