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This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.

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.

treetalker•2mo ago

Bro makes mistakes, and you tell by how the writing looks like?

aaomidi•2mo ago

Yes.

quickthrowman•2mo ago

If you see English written without articles (‘the’ and ‘a’) by someone who is ‘an American’, it was probably written by a Russian. It’s very easy to spot non-native English writing if you’re a native speaker.

It’s such an old concept that it’s written about in the Bible (Old Testament), referred to as a ‘shibboleth’, which in that case was a spoken word that revealed the native language of someone due to their inability to pronounce the word like a native speaker.

jaybrendansmith•2mo ago

MAGA is a Russian Psyops initiative. Very effective.

amai•2mo ago

Is it possible to figure out if an account uses VPN? X/Twitter should show that, if they want to be transparent about their user.

more_corn•2mo ago

Huh, who knew? (Hint, it was everyone but MAGA believers)