X Makes Change Disclosing Location
The rollout of X’s (formerly Twitter) new “About This Account” feature over the weekend did more than just pull back the curtain — it ripped it off the wall. What was intended as a transparency tool to help users spot coordinated inauthentic behavior ended up triggering a digital firestorm, especially across politically charged corners of the platform.
The reason? The feature began exposing what researchers have long suspected but never had the tools to confirm at scale: many of the loudest voices posing as American patriots, especially in the MAGA sphere, weren’t American at all.
With a few clicks, users could now see an account’s location, join date, and name history. Suddenly, prominent “America First” accounts were revealed to be operating from Nigeria, India, Russia, Pakistan, and Thailand. Overnight, patriotic avatars and stars-and-stripes bios were thrown into question. What X revealed was more than deception — it was a carefully orchestrated strategy of foreign infiltration, designed not to support but to sabotage.
According to X’s head of product Nikita Bier, the location data will be accurate to 99.99% with the next update. Already, that level of precision has been enough to shine light on foreign-run bot farms that have been using MAGA branding as digital camouflage — echoing American values while injecting narratives seeded by adversarial states. These aren’t just harmless fake accounts; they’re part of complex psychological operations run through an “identification-imitation-amplification” model, as outlined by researchers and institutions like the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Scientific American.
The strategy is chillingly effective: identify hot-button issues, impersonate real users within the target group, then flood the zone with posts designed to inflame, divide, and distract. These posts don’t just spread opinions — they weaponize disinformation.
In one case, after a major crisis, bot networks pushed out over 650,000 posts loaded with false-flag theories, racking up nearly 4 million interactions. These efforts weren’t isolated; they were tightly coordinated, moving from pro-MAGA messaging to anti-Trump smears the moment political winds shifted — proof that loyalty was never the goal. Destabilization was.
The same pattern played out across international issues. Accounts claiming to be Gazan journalists or war victims turned out to be tweeting from South Asia or U.S. soil, using tragedy as a platform to push anti-Israel narratives and raise funds under false pretenses. Israeli researchers found entire clusters of these operations masquerading as Middle Eastern civilians, all while pushing propaganda aligned with known adversarial interests.
For years, researchers have warned that cyber-influence operations aren’t random acts — they’re strategic campaigns designed to exploit ideological fault lines. With this new feature, X has finally given the public a tool to confirm what’s real and what’s manufactured. And the early results are damning.
What becomes clear is that many of the online personas waving the MAGA banner aren’t fighting for American ideals — they’re manipulating them. They're not here to unify or uplift but to sow chaos, using the language of patriotism as a delivery system for deception. This isn’t just about internet trolls or political dirty tricks; it’s a new front in modern information warfare. And now that the masks are slipping, it’s up to every user to think twice before trusting the loudest voices in their feed.
Because in the digital age, even your allies might not be who they say they are
