X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans

https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/x-just-accidentally-exposed-a-vast

198•adriand•1h ago

Comments

jrm4•56m ago

Absolutely wild that this isn't bigger news. This should be the front page of every major news network.

chneu•53m ago

Most of this, to some degree, has been well established for a while.

American Republicans have relied heavily on foreign interference to achieve their goals. From social media manipulation to laundering illegal political bribes, Republicans have been doing it.

jrm4•51m ago

100%, but the clear proof afforded by Elon should be the opportunity to really put it out there.

phantasmish•52m ago

It’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.

hbosch•49m ago

>It’s widely known and reported this is happening.

I am not sure it's "widely known and reported" that the official Twitter account for the Department of Homeland Security was created in, and is run from, Israel.

harrisonjackson•45m ago

https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743?s=20

> This is fake news. Location was not available on any gray check account at any point. Furthermore, the DHS has only shown IPs from the United States since account creation.

- head of product @x

Not to discount the impact of foreign powers over social media but maybe don't spread this misinformation.

hbosch•35m ago

Does this make the fact that it showed as Israel, was disabled, and is now "corrected", mean that this feature is good or bad?

Either we can trust all location data all the time, or we can trust none of it. We cannot expect Nikita Bier to swoop in on every suspicious tweet and try to educate us on IP range changes and DNS glitches or whatever.

Furthermore is it more likely that a small set of special accounts seemingly never collected location data on signup, or that for a small number of accounts X simply modified that data post-hoc?

MayeulC•33m ago

> the fact that it showed as Israel

Please re-read. That never happened.

hbosch•22m ago

It may have happened. There are already many users saying their "created in" locations were incorrect. Thus the rest of my comment: trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct.

JumpCrisscross•17m ago

> trust is binary. We can either be 100% certain the data is correct, or we must assume it is never correct

You’re mixing up trust and faith.

blitzar•32m ago

Blink twice if you are in danger.

redindian75•42m ago

after it was reported/recorded, X "fixed" it by making .gov accounts untrackable. So now it doesnt show Israel anymore (and MAGA accounts now have an opportunity to scream fake news)

Aarostotle•35m ago

Given the sibling comment here, I am wondering if you’ve fallen for a fake screenshot. I hope you did not make this up.

jsheard•33m ago

Yeah that DHS screenshot is fake. If you boost the exposure there's conspicuous gaps in the JPEG artifacts around the fields where they were edited.

They would have got away with it if they just used Inspect Element!

hbosch•28m ago

The same head of product quoted in the sib comment admits that "for a small set of accounts the location data was incorrect". Given what we know about Twitter's relationship with the government and this administration in particular, you're simply left to do with that information what you will.

I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much. I also would not be surprised if some government accounts were created at various embassies around the world or through strategic VPN networks, or if general business is conducted through a darknet-like node system which includes allied endpoints. To me those are more plausible.

JumpCrisscross•22m ago

> I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much

Then don’t conclude—much less spread as “known”—foreign interference from Twitter/X’s purported location data about the government.

dstroot•51m ago

They (major news networks) are owned by Trump friendlies (Bezos/WaPo, Soon-Shiong/LAT, etc.) or they are afraid of Trump’s influence.

mschuster91•39m ago

Don't know why you're being downvoted. Ever since Trump first silenced critics by abusing the authority of his office (or threatening to do so), it is painfully obvious how many large media houses shy away from all-too-blatant reporting.

yetihehe•51m ago

No one likes to be the bad messenger saying to Americans that they were fooled and all that hatred against their opponents (opposite party) was actually induced, not born out of their own superiority.

numpad0•50m ago

Musk's like a transparent kid these days. Anything he touches seem to disappear from media - there is such thing as bad publicity after all, I guess.

postflopclarity•44m ago

I mean it's been pretty obvious for a while...

the people who would care already knew about this. the people who didn't know about this don't care (or are in denial).

an0malous•31m ago

It’s going to get flagged off of HN front page within the hour like it did the last two times someone posted about it

ALittleSlow•3m ago

Tall tale signs of a foreign influence campaign cover up, watch your 6

lesuorac•27m ago

Why?

Govs doing influence campaigns was admitted during the twitter files [1]. While it's the US-relationship, Twitter is a global company so they're going to have other country relationships.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._8%E2%80%939...

simonw•24m ago

I doubt most of this is foreign government influence campaigns. I think it's more that Twitter will pay you to post clickbait, and if you are in Africa or many parts of Asia the amount you can earn is significant.

There was some great reporting about Macedonian teenagers doing this kind of thing back in 2016 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma... - it was actually the origin of the term "fake news" before Trump redefined it to mean any mainstream media coverage that he didn't like.

epistasis•22m ago

First, the government wasn't doing influence campaigns, and the "Twitter Files" had all been reported before, it was just a PR campaign for Musk to try to lessen trust among the populace.

Second, this is about foreign influence driving a lot of the self-destructive politics in the US. Right now the US is going through economic and political destruction a lot like Brexit, and it should be no surprise that it's being lead by those outside of the US who want to make the US weaker.

JumpCrisscross•18m ago

Twitter Files was what Brendan Carr did in the open, except more subtly. It’s almost quaint compared to what passes for normal today, to say nothing of Elon’s coöption by political forces. And it’s irrelevant to the claims made by the article, which appear to be fooling the few folks who might still be paying attention to trust and integrity at X.

JumpCrisscross•23m ago

> wild that this isn't bigger news

It may be. It may not.

So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.

We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample.

I’d be surprised if journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.

Fricken•21m ago

We've known of foreign influence campaigns targeting Americans on social media for a long time. A significant number of HN users have a vested interest in pretending it isn't the case. Some of them are making money off it. Others are too proud to entertain the notion that they might be the gullible victims of rage-bait and disinformation. Posts on the subject usually gets flagged pretty quick, but it's getting harder to ignore the truth.

NuclearPM•14m ago

Hard to compete with leaders being accused of raping, corruption, and and calling for execution of political opponents for newsworthiness.

rtkwe•13m ago

It's been known for a while this is just verification. Accounts give themselves away all the time accidentally through phrases or tells. eg: A tweet from an account claiming to be from the US talking about Texas succession that mentions 'warm water ports', very few people care or think about that because all the ports on the continental US don't freeze over in the winter. (In fact very few countries do because most have as many warm water ports as they need, one of the few with significant issues with this is... Russia)

cranberryturkey•55m ago

That’s crazy

Natsu•55m ago

It's not really "accidental. Exposing stuff like this is precisely why they rolled out the country of origin feature.

andrenotgiant•21m ago

But that would be a narrative violation. X.com and Elon Musk can't possibly be portrayed doing anything positive or productive.

kardianos•54m ago

It isn't bigger news because it would expose many of the targets they like to throw things at (eg Groypers) are not American, but foreign agents masquerading as such.

macintux•53m ago

Effectively a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028422, so while I agree this is important news that should be widely covered, we don't need another thread.

consumer451•38m ago

They should be merged in that case.

throw_m239339•52m ago

This isn't by accident. It's funny however how both sides are ignoring the foreign networks aimed at their own camp.

tetris11•48m ago

Both sides? This is news to me. Where can I read more

add-sub-mul-div•45m ago

Is there anyone left who's falling for the idea of symmetry of scope on what's going on? It reads like the most transparent attempt at diversion and denial.

radiorental•44m ago

Right, and the outcome changes little that wasn't already known.

The interesting part of this story is why was this switched on now, by whom? Why was it briefly turned off? Was that an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle?

unshavedyak•38m ago

Briefly turned off? Oh it's back on? That's good at least. I thought he permanently turned it off the moment it didn't align with his goals.

postflopclarity•43m ago

... "both sides" ? seems pretty heavily one sided to me.

leosanchez•51m ago

Not just America, I assume this is pretty common for most countries' political discourse on Twitter.

Reddit also needs to have a feature like this.

consumer451•38m ago

Here is one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/poland/comments/1p5cqcs/literally_e...

nodesocket•51m ago

As the article mentions a lot of the accounts probably just using VPN services. Remember when Elon exposed the US government in cahoots with Meta and Twitter actively shadow banning people for free speech on legitimate topics such as covid, covid vaccines, masks, and the woke agenda?

RoyTyrell•34m ago

The "Twitter Files" absolutely did not expose anything like that, despite what Lord Genius Elon tried to imply. At best it exposed internal discussion and policies that may have suppressed posts related to Covid, but showed that the Biden administration was largely (largely doesn't mean never) uninvolved with that. It seems like the most they asked was in regards to the "Hunter Biden Laptop" issue and that was largely with posts that were showing the nudes of the women that he was sleeping with, not even posts that were just nude Hunter.

Elon then turned on Matt Taibbi and banned him from Twitter when he wouldn't go along with his lying and spin.

devin•27m ago

You mean when he teamed up with hack journalist Matt Taibi to try and make a mountain out of a molehill?

jagged-chisel•50m ago

“Moving forward, we’ll likely see a re-examination of how much credence we give to social media as a barometer of public opinion.”

Who is “we?” Not the media in the US, I’d wager.

hbarka•50m ago

How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?

mikeyouse•46m ago

Remember when Musk’s entire cause celebre was to expose the bot networks and paid trolls on Twitter and then he dropped all of that bluster when he realized how useful they’d be to his political goals?

phantasmish•38m ago

They’re probably also such a large part of the active Twitter “user base” that substantially reigning them in would be enough to put the product into a permanent, sharp decline.

neuralkoi•35m ago

This also was an individual who was getting very little sleep, taking an unknown assortment of hallucinogenic psychotropics, who clearly got drunk off his own success and the attention he got, possibly psyop'd by multiple governments due to his reach and influence.

It's kind of tragic. He reminds me of Smeagol from Lord of the Rings. People lacking any virtue (like wisdom, compassion, or courage) are extremely vulnerable to external dark forces.

jpadkins•20m ago

Then why is he allowing it to be exposed right now? If actually useful to his political goals, he would suppress the launch of the location feature, right?

jjk166•3m ago

If your bot farm happens to be domestic, exposing all the foreign bot-farms competing for the same audience seems like a no brainer.

throw_m239339•34m ago

> How does Elon Musk reconcile this with his own behavior on X, personally boosting fringe people and groups?

Musk has his own agenda.

Myzel394•50m ago

Am I the only one who feels like the article is at least partially written by AI?

haritha-j•30m ago

yes

mlmonkey•48m ago

Unfortunately, it requires 3 clicks ("account" -> "join date" -> "about account") to get the required information.

It should be visible on the post itself: where it was posted from, and where the author's account is mostly located. Just 2 little chips stuck on top of each and every post.

space_ghost•44m ago

Followed immediately by these groups making VPNs a standard part of their toolkit. This data is enlightening but its reveal doesn't solve the problem.

luxuryballs•34m ago

yeah it needs to be robust enough to keep a trail so it can detect leaks and predict, and perhaps eventually identify vpn nodes, like Reddit will often block my request when I’m on VPN so there may be a way to smartly disregard certain requests from being counted as the true location, this seems really complicated the more I think about it though

ericmay•33m ago

Twitter can require verification on their end or require ID upload or something along those lines. The social media companies can solve this problem, it’s just way too profitable to not. They make a lot of money when you read about non-existent events from an account curated in China or India or Belarus and then go look at a bunch of ads for Patriot Bars (R) or Rainbow socks (L) or whatever.

They could by default for example require an identification of some sort, and then allow “non-ID” accounts to exist but require specific opt-in to view broadly or something along those lines.

More easily though you can just delete your account and then you don’t have to care about any of this crap.

rtkwe•29m ago

There's already pretty sophisticated setups to get fake live ID verifications where it's already a cat and mouse game between the tools to verify and the tools faking live verifications (sometimes including just scamming people into acting as the 'user' for verification). Ideally I'd also not have to provide my ID for yet another inane service and risk that ID getting leaked as seems to be inevitable.

ericmay•23m ago

Yea that’s fair. I guess the easy/best solution is to just not use the product in that case.

But I’d be in favor of even an in-person verification system though the costs to do that would be unpalatable but I guess you could stand up a 3rd party to do that. Maybe there are better solutions out there that I’m not thinking of. I do know it’s very much against what the larger social media companies would want though because they actively want you to be outraged and misinformed since they make a lot of money off of that.

bequanna•32m ago

It seems like they are using a more sophisticated way to determine location (App Store download county, etc) not just IP.

hbosch•43m ago

It wouldn't be difficult to include a little "" icon on each post that, when hovered, shows probable location or the creation origin. It's true that VPN's will often muddy this info, and even things like phone number confirmation for 2FA or billing address for Verified badges can't be 100% reliable... but it shouldn't be too difficult to say in those cases "User likely masking location" if the pattern is detected.

ecommerceguy•20m ago

Yes, X is the new /pol.

How many of these accounts are Russian? I bet hardly any. My money is mostly from a small country in the middle east.

kg•34m ago

In the old days 'where it was posted from' used to be displayed on tweets, and Elon intentionally changed it to 'Earth'. Interesting to see a backpedal here, albeit concealed.

jsheard•29m ago

Didn't that show the client the user posted from, not their location? Which was mostly useless anyway after they all but killed the API.

ancorevard•27m ago

This is incorrect.

The old Twitter and its API had "source" field which showed the client app a tweet was sent from.

{ "created_at": "Mon Nov 20 12:34:56 +0000 2023", "id_str": "1726578932412345678", "full_text": "Example tweet", "source": "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/download/iphone\" rel=\"nofollow\">Twitter for iPhone</a>", ... }

mlmonkey•11m ago

If you had access to the twitter feed (and I did at one point, as our company got the firehose from Twitter), it showed the Lat/Long of where it was posted from IIRC.

I still remember looking at that tweet when the helos went in for OBL, from someone in Abottabad PK, saying something like "helicopters hovering at 2AM... this is a rare occurrence" (or something like that).

chuckreynolds•22m ago

they really should. i thought they'd have a flag on the actual profile.

bargainbin•48m ago

Wild reading the news earlier to see Iran is making a concerted effort to influence Scottish Independence.

Is the idea to weaken the UK? To what end?

Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back? The CIA and MI6 are no stranger to destabilising regimes, and yet surely it would be more common knowledge if we were employing people to post anti-Putin propaganda on Russian forums?

consumer451•45m ago

Iran is very much an ally of Russia. The theory I have seen for Moscow wanting Scottish independence is that they might remove the UK's only nuclear sub port from their newly independent country.

Also, it would be a general black eye for the UK, which has been very supportive of the defense of Ukraine.

rz2k•36m ago

That sounds like the blundering VP/president in The Diplomat. I wonder if it's instead North Sea Oil, and Iran preferring a UK with less energy independence.

phpnode•37m ago

> Is the idea to weaken the UK? To what end?

Yes, of course, the same with Brexit. It is is in Iran and Russia's interests for their enemies to be divided and distracted by internal conflict.

mamonster•30m ago

>Also, if it’s being done to us, surely we’re doing it back?

Until USAID got gutted, yes. Now not sure.

im3w1l•25m ago

Probably but it's also more complicated than such a simplistic analysis. I think they want to jam the communications in general. Make big problems seem small. Make small problems seem big. Make people suspect legitimate debaters of being trolls.

blibble•7m ago

scottish independence occurring likely ends the UK nuclear deterrent (or makes it much harder practically)

a couple hundred thousand dollars to potentially eliminate the UK as a nuclear power? seems like a no brainer if you're iran/russia

teddyX•44m ago

And DOGE was cancelled the day after. Coincidence I’m sure

MomsAVoxell•43m ago

Until we see the source code for how X is determining the geo-location, all bets are off.

This could just as easily be X, trying to influence opinions on the nature of America's divisive classes, which is to say there is just as much evidence that is the case as any other circumstances one might conclude.

jajuuka•35m ago

Exactly. Using Twitter as a primary source for this is dubious. Already seen a few accounts prove that they are where they say they are even though X shows them as being half way across the world.

Following occams razor, I think they released a broken feature and have taken it down since then to fix it. Which leads all these "revelations" to be based on incomplete or false data. Not to say the site isn't filled with bots and influence campaigns, it absolutely is. But basing that conclusion on this location information is foolish.

welcome_dragon•29m ago

Make sure that tin foil hat is secure there

mschuster91•41m ago

It's not just Americans that are being targeted. If you look at prominent far-right pseudo-influencers (i.e. identities not tied to a real living person) in Germany, the result is just the same. Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa - not Germany.

Or it's everyone being targeted by scammers posing as Gazans - these scammers are, for me, the vilest of the vile. No matter which team one is on regarding this particular conflict... abusing the dire situation in which many Gazans legitimately are to grift money is outright wrong.

We need to hold Russia and China, the most likely actors pulling the strings, accountable. No more niceties, no more playing with the big guys, until this kind of warfare stops. And so we should treat every country hosting the low-level agents. Clean shop or get hammered. I'm sick and tired of cyber crime, propaganda warfare and scamming our elderly. Enough is enough.

josefrichter•41m ago

So... Is Musk really trying to say he didn't know this before election? This has to be investigated, as it has implications far beyond Musk. This is basically a global scandal.

jsheard•35m ago

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these accounts were psyops, but the majority are probably just grifters exploiting X's revenue sharing system. We've already seen that play out on Facebook where users in developing countries would spam low-effort, high-engagement content to make money. That might mean producing political rage-bait or posting AI-generated Shrimp Jesus pictures (amen), whatever gets the clicks this week.

superxpro12•22m ago

In any case, it's manufacturing immoral and violent sentiment to the detriment of society. Why should we allow such things to percolate? What benefit is this providing to society?

jsheard•20m ago

There's no benefit to society, but revshare abuse differs in that it's self-inflicted by the platforms. They can make it go away by not rewarding that behaviour.

incomingpain•33m ago

Every other ad on the internet is for vpn services. Some work better than others.

From my pov, what a great change.

Anyone talking without specific location, it doesnt matter.

Anyone talking positively about something, it doesn't matter.

We now know more about those interacting in a negative way.

ZeroGravitas•32m ago

The "scary foreign" parts of this seems to miss the forest for the trees.

Social media makes rage-baiting people into a lucrative career and opens it up to anyone with an internet connection.

an0malous•26m ago

No it’s definitely more important that foreign countries are manipulating American politics through social media than people in poor countries are making money off of rage bait (and likely many of the latter are being paid by the former).

ALittleSlow•30m ago

To be or not to be, xenophobic and America first? Perhaps we should blame this on Big VPN? Or is this more 20-minute city geo-fencing technology pushing? All sorts of fun ways to spin this one.

SPICLK2•30m ago

Further evidence that a national firewall is a prudent idea. What kind of careless government would permit anyone in the world to have unfettered, anonymous access to their citizens' thoughts and minds?

braincat31415•21m ago

National firewall? No thank you.

DonHopkins•9m ago

Transphobic troll? No thank YOU.

braincat31415•3m ago

Russia and China have national firewalls. Feel free to move.

karakot•16m ago

Agreed comrade, only goverment sanctioned communication should be allowed.

fsckboy•29m ago

>likely the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since the revelations about Russia in 2016

the 2016 "revelations" were a nothing-burger, ginned up as cover for the actual dangerous conspiracy, to spy on a rival political campaign in a scandal that eclipses Watergate.

daveguy•21m ago

Wow, they really got you, didn't they. Good luck leaving if you ever try.

hulud•28m ago

4chan’s /pol/ has had the flag forever, and “show flag” is a typical callout.

Only the normies are surprised and the pearl clutching on HN is farcical. You should know better by now.

I guess the outrage must be manufactured so let’s all join hands and pretend we are shocked by this news and demand something be done, I guess. Slow news week.

ChrisArchitect•26m ago

X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028422

X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417

Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211

vcryan•24m ago

It definitely could be foreign influence. It also could be US companies/campaigns (same thing...) outsourcing their astroturfing to other countries to save money.

AJRF•22m ago

The attempts at controlling the narrative feel a lot more unsubtle since Musk took over.

I bet dollars to donuts that they are tipping the scale on stoking up tensions on UK users with things like migration and class division.

I only follow tech people on twitter, but if you looked at my FYP you'd think I was deeply interested in UK politics - which I am not!

annexrichmond•22m ago

This is mostly why I stopped going on Reddit. At least on X I have more control over what I see and mostly just follow trustworthy accounts. I just assume most of the commentary on mainstream American subreddits like politics is infiltrated by foreign actors and bots.

MengerSponge•16m ago

LMAO.

You've got a chance if you use Mastodon or Bluesky, but you don't have control of the X algorithm.

OutOfHere•20m ago

When will Hacker News target the covert non-American influencers pretending to be Americans and holding strong positions on American issues?

baiac•17m ago

Why is the word “accidentally” used when this is a feature that was implemented with this particular reason in mind?

mpalmer•8m ago

Because it gets clicks.

herpdyderp•6m ago

Given Musk's political affiliations, it seems unlikely that this was the intended outcome.

blibble•5m ago

the social media companies have likely had this data for a decade and decided to sit on it, as our democracies implode

I guess the CTR for disinformation bots must be good?

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