For anyone that it matters for, they won't care it shows they are using a vpn and for anyone trying to be deceitful using a vpn then it will downplay their credibility.
But if you use a fake name and fake email, which people should be using on twitter, who cares.
Also if you self host your VPN, how would twitter know. Looks like only people using a commercial VPN will be flagged.
What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.
Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-influencers-accidenta...
”Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.
In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.”
So for X to solve its authenticity issue... that's a tricky one. They want to allow "all opinions" and yet they want to limit the ones that aren't authentic. So how do you know if a post is authentic? What makes a person more or less "authentic"?
For me, it's really a fundamental issue of "this medium is not suitable to measure or label authenticity" (social media).
Now their hand is forced, and they will actually have to try and mask their location.
We should criticize their content tho, not form, shape or location.
everybody wants to be american. nobody with agency is rooting for anything other than the US. seriously, if youre not topblasting the S&P, i dont know what to tell you. theres like the entire 2nd and 3rd world combined waiting for their paycheque to come in every month so they can spend it on the US.
by 2100, we are gonna have a graveyard of langauges that nobody speaks anymore.
I'm so sorry that your circle isn't worried about what's happening around them. I'm happily surrounded by young and middle aged people that cares about their neighborhood, city, and national politics. I'd prefer that they didn't have to worry because everything was perfect, but this is what we have, and I'm happy that near me there's people with empathy and solidarity feelings.
Not in Europe. I know personally several people who have moved here recently, and none who want to go the other direction. In fact there's been an uptick in the number of people who've told me they'd be reluctant to even visit the US.
Personally I'm not fussed, but I've definitely cooled on any plans I had to move back stateside.
Though it's worth noting this was happening under Prigozhin's lead, and since he's fallen out of a window now, it's unclear what's become of his troll factories.
Being pro-MAGA just happens to be the only thing that works really well (aside from gimmick accounts that repost from subreddits). If Elon suddenly made a 180 into being anti-MAGA and tweaked the algorithm to reflect that, these "bots" would switch their message as well.
2013 for the Internet Research Agency, but likely before for other organisations.
It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.
Your account will get pre-locked due to "reputational quality" immediately. Usually, they then demand photo ID, phone number or app, or some other onerous process.
If you need a VPN but dont want this "bad quality VPN smell", what you're looking for is a "residential IP VPN". Those look and smell like a Comcast IP, but are VPNs.
These so-called "America First" and "MEGA" accounts have been driving a wedge within the conservative party for a while. Many speculated that these were largely foreign accounts, but it was hard to prove, until now.
Many of the racist "conservative" voices are being shown to be from Iran or other countries.
[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science...
I ponder how effective this would be against an adversary sufficiently motivated to look like they're not using a VPN. And then does it result in a false sense of trust, since a user thinks the system more reliably detects a VPN then it does. Or an adversary who has bypassed the system to then point to it to build additional trust.
"A guy that posts popular incendiary takes about US politics like it's his job is routing through VPNs and his real location is unknown" might be valuable information to the public.
And I think that the Nazi-salute guy who runs Twitter is playing a game with this.
Does the distinction not make sense from your perspective?
IMHO the program itself just encourages misinformation and should be scrapped.
That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.
I recall that Twitter had a serious account takeover problem which reached the point that eve high profile accounts were hijacked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking
Of course owners of dead accounts don't complain.
The way Elon Musk's Twitter decided to render blue checkmarks useless leads me to believe this is by design.
Because I suspect "warning this person isnt an idiot" doesnt turn out to be the warning they expect.
Unrelated, but the amount of ads on Vice.com has become insufferable to the point where I cannot read the article without an ad-blocker with any default installed browser.
If you don't want to switch to Firefox and are still using a Chromium-based browser, get Ublock Origin Lite [0] which still works.
[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1p4i95z/the_off...
In the states, I desperately want a state-verified ID system that I can use to post on social media. However I don’t want it to be mandated.
The cases where their location does matter, there wasnt a question as to where they were from.
There were virtually no surprises from my point of view.
cyanydeez•2mo ago
marginalia_nu•2mo ago
There's been a whole slew of the most prolific accounts that were spamming inflamatory political propaganda, ostensibly targeting Europe or the US that have been reveal to operate out of India, Pakistan, south east asia, etc.
haizhung•2mo ago
locknitpicker•2mo ago
I think it's a more coordinated and professional operation that you are suggesting. The US and even western Europe in general has been constantly hammered by Russian bots and professional accounts spewing all sort of extremist and sensationalized content that is aligned with the Kremlin's agenda. It's not limited to Twitter too, as places such as Reddit's conservative subreddit is renowned for being mainly a Russian psyop with barely any US citizen posting there.