Many of the MAGA influencers outed as living in countries like Nigeria and Bangladesh have since vanished from X.
The users, who had over a million followers between them, had their country of origin exposed over the weekend as part of a new X feature that now shows where accounts were created and how their owners downloaded the social platform’s app.
Four prominent accounts unmasked by the feature—DarkMAGA, MagaScope, WilliamAlbrech, and IvankaNews_—now show as being “suspended” for violating “X rules,” though it is unclear which. X’s website says it bars users who pretend to be someone they are not—something all the accounts appear to be guilty of.
They are probably already back with new names. Or the rest of their names.
Did these X admins not realize the fallout or was there some other intended purpose?
I can smell the outrage from here.
Some gifts wrap themselves….
to later reappear with different username
This will 100% happen
your 9 days old account makes me think you’re probably familiar with the technique
You are fucking disgusting and pathetic :3
And I don’t even need to look at your account details to know that.
lol, you shouldn’t uncover your alt accounts like that
Twitter should be nationalized in the public interest and made the online public square like the national mall. Fully transparent and accountable.
Sounds cool, until the fascists take over the government…
they already have
As opposed to the non fascists in corporations?
I think you mean, X should be nationalized like our social security numbers have been. It’s only fair, the piece of shit who runs it is the only reason that even happened, why not keep things fair?
I think the whole shit show should be nationalized and sold for whatever scrap it’s worth while the branding is thrown into public domain.
To hear fElon tell it, that’s what he thought Twitter was before, and what he aimed for Xitter to uphold…
LOL. Sorry, hard to type that w/o laughing.
Impartial government owned news is not possible.
Nobody said it would be impartial. It’s not impartial now. Might as well make the propaganda be official, imirite?
Maybe try not being followers who allow ourselves to be influenced. I think if you had described this social media situation to average people 20 years ago most would have seen it as dystopian, evil even. But because it happened so gradually it gained acceptance.
I guess what I’m saying is we should get the hell rid of it all so eventually public opinion won’t be swayed by cheap foreign labor, bots, and people who just want to burn it all down.
But we won’t because too many think all this is better than the world before it existed.
/rant
Follow ideas, not people
I guess what I’m saying is we should get the hell rid of it all so eventually public opinion won’t be swayed by cheap foreign labor, bots, and people who just want to burn it all down.
I’ve blocked so many accounts on here that are clearly not Americans just straight up trying to incite shit in US news / politics communities. I don’t know what’s worse: the number of upvotes those get or how transparent they are.
Always feel conflicted blocking guys like this… I wanna keep seeing them so I can downvote, but they also are just fucking annoying and toxic.
So you’re saying Lemmy should show the country of accounts too?
If only we could go back to the halcyon days of twenty years ago, when people were not influenced by talkshow hosts, athletes hawking household goods, and tabloids breathlessly reporting on actors and socialites.
That requires a population that is educated and can critically read and analyze media. Don’t think any country in the world has that.
Okay, you’ve swayed my opinion on this.
I mean… 20 years ago when we only had Xanga, MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, and many others. Even Facebook is 21 years old now… though it didn’t become available for everyone for a couple years after that.
It’s been just short of 20 years since Twitter was created.
I was wondering if this is just because of VPN use or something but nope this confirms they’re actually just hired trolls and the rubes have been manipulated this whole time. Fucking pathetic how dumb we are.
The hired trolls are only one part of the problem. The other problem – perhaps the bigger problem – is that running scam / spam accounts is a legitimate occupation for people living in near-poverty. They need to put food on the table, and if they can do so by posting MAGA bullshit to get the advertising clicks, of course they’ll keep on doing that.
This is a good example of why everyone should be working to improve the living situations of everyone else in the world, and not just in their own country. It’s not like most people enjoy running scams, but if that pays the bills, fuck it, let the rich Americans sort it out.
There are literal companies you can hire. They also do it to cancel people or promote beliefs about people.
A good example is that Johnny Depp admitted he hired one against his ex during the public court stuff to make her look bad. Amber Heard. And it worked.
Companies, in this case, owned by Saudi
This stuff sounds like crackpot conspiracy theories. But it’s real. This stuff is reality now.
That last paragraph was something that struck me…I was thinking about this earlier in the day.
The great thing about disadvantaged groups is that they are easy to exploit.
This isn’t cheating. This is playing the game strictly by the rules. The whole system of checks and balances assumed good faith and professional conduct. That turned out to be a really shitty assumption.
Well, lots of tankies, “centrists”, and of course nearly all Republicans seem to think that concerns about Russia going back to 2016’s election are a “hoax”.
I don’t know if they could even begin to articulate what they think that word means in the context of their claims. But they sure are butthurt about it.
It wasn’t just based on IP from what I understand, but also what country’s app store you used.
I could be wrong here, but unless you’re actively trying to hide something pretty serious, I’d be surprised if people use a VPN and set it to a country like Nigeria or Bangladesh if you’re from NA.
Maybe Canada if you’re from the USA, likely other states, or maybe somewhere in the EU if you think their data protection laws will be better for you.
But Nigeria? Who fuck sets their VPN there?
I know I’ve had to try several countries before I found Invidious instances that would work over a VPN. It seems that there are a few European countries that work, though.
( I guess I don’t understand enough about how Invidious works, but I sure don’t think that Alphabet needs to track my views of random videos. )
I wonder if this will actually affect some upcoming election outcomes.
And now I think every other major commercial platform in use in the United States should do the same…
They’ll be back.
And with greater VPNs
This mass user exodus sponsored by ExpressVPN™
Well, duh. The future is full of sponsorships! The question is, which corporation do you fight for?
Probably already are
And in greater numbers.
I wonder. People saying it isn’t VPNs aren’t necessarily wrong but I do want to say it’s likely they are using bot networks to mass create accounts and those might use IP rotation. Those IPs can come from any fucking place. I’ve only seen it from scraping operations, but I bet it’s necessary when mass operating bullshit accounts.
US proxies exist, but they’re more expensive and wouldn’t make as much sense for mass creating if your goal is just to avoid getting blocked.
I’m not sure I can believe that Elon thought this wouldn’t have a downside. He had to know so many right-wing chud accounts weren’t US based.
Idk he has kinda proven himself to be an incompetent nazi on many different occasions
Maybe he just weighed the ups/downs for the moment. He didn’t have the bot farms up trying to convince people to vote for Trump and sway public opinion anymore maybe. Maybe he made the call that exposing accounts and introducing the idea he can expose them a threat to any political upstarts wanting to take the next monarchy grasp. He can expose the accounts he wants, while spending less money having to combat any political opposition that may want to run similar campaign tactics that they used.
There are members who wanted to go further into “America first” bologna, maybe he realized that won’t be beneficial for him long term finally
I was assuming he did this as a way to expose the already-marginalized or something. Did he have a reason for doing this?
Musk pretends he’s something he’s not on Shitter all the time.
A compassionate genius?
So… I can’t use an alias on Shitter?
Needs to be Shitter, LLC based in USSR.
If all else fails maybe he could try not being a morally bankrupt pos and get some therapy to get people to like him. in all honesty he’s irredeemable and needs to go to prison though
I heard it was because they used VPNs! (/s if needed)
