Elon Musk’s social media echo chamber X-formerly-Twitter introduced a new feature over the weekend that shows the location where its users have been tweeting from — a move that has exposed an embarrassing problem for the social network: that many of its most politically inflammatory users are actually foreign scammers cashing in on gullible and outrage-hungry Americans.
As the New York Times reports, it didn’t take long for online sleuths to notice that accounts that post MAGA ragebait weren’t actually tweeting from the United States; instead, they’re based in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world, often linked to online scams and schemes.
For instance, one account that pays for the platform’s blue checkmark “verification” service, called “MAGA NATION,” is based in “Eastern Europe (Non-EU).” The account has shy of 400,000 followers and, as its name suggests, furthers an extreme-right agenda.
A separate account called Dark Maga was found to be tweeting from Thailand, per The Guardian. Another, called MAGA Scope, is posting from Nigeria.
One Ivanka Trump fan account, called IvankaNews, which has since been suspended, regularly posted far-right content and had a million followers. According to the new feature, the account was based in Nigeria, as the Daily Beast reports.
Even worse, any of the MAGA accounts appear to be harnessing generative AI for their scams.
“It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort ragebait,” journalist Derek Guy wrote. “My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.”
The fracas perfectly illustrates what has become of X-formerly-Twitter since Musk took it over in 2022. Experts have observed a massive surge in hate speech, including antisemitism and racism, on the platform, in large part thanks to its flailing content moderation efforts.
Musk has also used the platform to post hateful content and conspiracy theories himself, setting a problematic tone overall.
The platform also has a storied history of being manipulated by foreign influence campaigns. For instance, last year, an independent think tank, the Centre for Information Resilience, noted that fake MAGA accounts were being used to influence the 2024 presidential election.
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