According to The Verge, X’s new About This Account feature immediately revealed the shocking scale of foreign troll accounts posing as American political activists. Profiles with names like ULTRAMAGA🇺🇸TRUMP🇺🇸2028 were actually based in Nigeria, while a verified account impersonating border czar Tom Homan traced to Eastern Europe. An entire network of “Trump-supporting independent women” claiming American origins was located in Thailand, and America_First0 appeared to operate from Bangladesh. The revelations sparked viral threads exposing hundreds of accounts across the political spectrum that weren’t who they claimed to be. Shortly after the feature launched, X removed information about where accounts were created and added disclaimers about potential inaccuracies from travel, VPNs, and proxies.
The foreign influence reality check
Here’s the thing: we’ve known about foreign influence operations on social media for years. The Senate Intelligence Committee documented Russia’s information warfare back in 2019. But seeing the actual locations of these rage-bait accounts makes the problem feel more immediate and tangible. When you can click through and see that the most aggressive political accounts aren’t even in the country whose politics they’re screaming about? It changes the conversation completely.
Follow the money
While state-sponsored campaigns from Russia and China definitely exist, I think we’re underestimating the pure financial motivation here. As one user noted, engagement farming on X can be incredibly lucrative in developing nations. What seems like pocket change to Americans might be life-changing money in Nigeria or Bangladesh. So you get these industrial-scale operations where people are paid to stir up political anger because rage drives engagement, and engagement drives revenue. Basically, the platform’s own monetization incentives are working against its integrity.
The quick rollback
Now, the most telling part of this whole saga might be how quickly X walked back the location transparency. Within days, they removed the creation location data and added all those caveats about VPNs and travel. Sure, some legitimate users might appear to be in different locations. But come on – do we really believe that hundreds of accounts suddenly appearing to be overseas are all just using VPNs? The timing is just too convenient. It feels like the platform revealed something it wasn’t prepared to handle, then quickly tried to put the genie back in the bottle.
The platform’s impossible position
So where does this leave X? They’re caught between transparency and the uncomfortable truth that their platform is absolutely flooded with inauthentic activity. As security researchers have documented, these networks are sophisticated and persistent. But here’s the real question: does the platform actually want to solve this problem? Because cleaning it up would mean admitting the scale is massive, and it might seriously impact engagement metrics that advertisers care about. Sometimes it’s easier to just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
