What does X’s new location data actually show? : NPR

A new feature rolled out on social media platform X has sparked a wave of accusations, suggesting that many account holders are not physically located where users assume. Late last week, Elon Musk's Company X added additional information to most accounts, including some that could provide clues about where the account user is located.

The apparent discrepancy quickly became apparent. Account called @MAGANationX which describes itself as “The Patriotic Voice for We the People”, is labeled as “based in Eastern Europe (outside the EU)”. The @American handle was “Based in Pakistan.” An account used by a person who identifies as a journalist in Gaza now states that he is “based” in Poland and “connected through” an app in the UK. This could mean a number of things, including that the account was registered in the UK. X has not yet provided definitions of the terms.

Other account holders did not claim to be located in the US or to be American, but they nevertheless feature in American political discourse. Doge Designer, an account dedicated to praising Musk and his companies with 1.7 million followers, including Musk himself, is based in India. Fan account Ivanka Trumpwhose bio reads “No connection to @IvankaTrump,” has nearly a million followers and is based in Nigeria. Similar fan account Barron Trumpwhich calls itself “the most ruthless and accurate fan account on X”, currently has over half a million followers and is “based in Eastern Europe (outside the EU)”.

While the terms are undefined and location data can be easily manipulated, accusations that accounts are run by impostors and “astroturfs” quickly spread across X and social media in general. X has since suspended the @American account and an Ivanka Trump fan account, although it is unclear what policies those accounts violated. X policy prohibits impersonation of another person, but allows the creation of fan accounts.

Fury farming

It's possible that some of the accounts may actually belong to people overseas who are posing as Americans or implying that they are Americans, said Renee DiResta, a research assistant professor at Georgetown University who studies social media platforms. She said their motivation is mainly financial.

“It’s a really easy way to generate rage—in this case, generate clicks, generate direct monetization. This is something we’ve been seeing for a very long time across all the different platforms.”

Other platforms such as Facebook have increased transparency adding location and username changes to some pages following the 2016 presidential election. The move follows revelations that teenagers V Macedonia made money by running groups and pages that catered to Trump supporters.

Darren Linville, a professor who studies influence campaigns at Clemson University's Media Forensics Lab, agrees. “In India and other countries outside the US, it is worth investing in pretending to be American to make more money. You can make more money as an influencer from the US than as an influencer from Russia or India. In all likelihood, in most of these cases, capitalism is carried out by people.”

In many ways, this trend has continued. Investigations Tech publication 404 Media found that hustlers in developing countries have created playbooks and channels to generate income from social media, catering to things that generate engagement, such as partisan rage.

While engaged farming exists across all sorts of ideological and geopolitical fault lines around the world, DiResta noted in his blog that people on the right are particularly targeted by those hoping to profit from partisan political content.

Since Musk took control of Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, he has cut teams dedicated to hidden behavior and made account verification obsolete, making blue tick this indicated that the account was verified and available for purchase by anyone.

While X's new Transparency feature has shed light on possible imposters, DiResta cautioned that most of the power brokers in American politics are still real people based in the US.

Data is not the last word

Engaged farming is just one way to explain the seemingly contradictory location tags. Researchers who study hidden online behavior also say the data X posted, while valuable and interesting, is not reliable, and caution against viewing it as the only reason to question the integrity of an account.

“What worries me is that people are jumping to sweeping conclusions,” said Emerson Brooking, research manager at the nonprofit Digital Forensics Research Lab at the Atlantic Council. “This becomes a convenient backdrop for rejecting any version with which we disagree.”

Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer close to Trump, used the fact that one pro-Trump account was “based in Turkey” to say, “I've been telling everyone for MONTHS that Jew-hating and MAGA-hating is a psychological operation by the Muslim Brotherhood.” Meanwhile, influential right-wing figures came forward with a platform anti-Semites and their ideas.

The Israeli government condemned “Ghazan's fake accounts” in one X-postcalling them “manipulative aggressors” [sic]“One of the accounts linked to by the Israeli government appears to belong to a man from Gaza. X labeled the account as “Connected via the UK App Store.” On Monday the account posted video of a man in front of tents and clotheslines telling the camera: “I never left Gaza except in 2012 when I did my Masters in International Development in London.” Middle East Eye media attacked the man protection.

The data also turned out to be inaccurate. Three NBC journalists discovered that their “home bases” were places they had recently traveled to, not where they were currently located. exit reported.

Brooking said that compared to other social networks, X and its former incarnation Twitter have always had a stronger culture of anonymity and privacy. “X, actually Twitter, gained its popularity as a tool for people to express their views. Sometimes when they lived in situations where the government did not allow them to express those views.”

Questions remain about how the new location tags work. For some accounts, X displays a warning message: “Country or region may not be accurate,” referring to location masking tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs).

The data could add more evidence and provide a more complete picture of accounts that are already under scrutiny, Linville said. He looked at several accounts whose users appeared to be British citizens commenting on Scottish independence. He and his colleagues had long suspected that the accounts were controlled by the Iranian government. One account examined by Linville now states that it was “connected through an Iranian Android app.” “And now you look at their account information and see that they signed up for X on an Iranian service,” Linville said.

X did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.