Surely you remember the whole Russiagate scandal, which was basically the media’s way of trying to hamstring Donald Trump by claiming his election was the result of collusion with Russia. The lesson we learned is that, indeed, foreign entities do try and control our elections, but they’re really not very successful at it.
They also try to control our political discourse, as we found out thanks to a “glitch” on X. Sleuthing users found out that it was possible to learn the origin of any user, with some shocking results. As RedState’s Bonchie revealed, “90% of the ‘GOP civil war over Israel’ stuff has been pushed by foreign accounts that got exposed last night. The other 10% has been Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.”
“So it turned out a large chunk of the Jew-hating crowd were foreigners, posing as Americans. It’s almost like the woke-Right is just an astroturfed foreign op to fracture MAGA from within,” chimed in the X user known as Clandestine.
“I was reflexively disinclined to believe it was all foreign accounts promoting racism and anti-Semitism under the guise of the pro-Trump America First banner. That sounded too easy, and similar to the (now debunked) idea that all the Trump content on Facebook in 2016 was actually Russian bots,” added Robby Soave of Reason Magazine. “But… this ‘account-based in’ feature actually has unmasked tons of groypers as Pakistani, as far as I can tell? Very useful feature, and kudos to Elon Musk and the X team for implementing it. The hate is not coming from inside the house!”
John Hinderaker of PowerLine, as well as Anders Hagstrom of Fox News, also commented on the leak, for lack of a better word, with hilarious results. It seems like reporting from Gaza is the same as doing so from a climate-controlled living room far from the battle front.
The Left however, pounced on the news that a number of MAGA-friendly X users were actually from overseas. “You got a peak (sic) behind the curtain at just how much of the MAGA hatred is just Russian propaganda,” sneered “author and academic” Adam Cochran, who posts from “North America,” by the way.
As I found out, the feature has been made permanent, and yes, it is fun. As X’s Head of Product, Nikita Bier explained last Friday, “In a couple hours, we’ll be rolling out About This Account globally, allowing you to see the country or region where an account is based. This will be accessible by tapping the signup date on profiles. This is an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square. We plan to provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X.”
Indeed, I clicked on the date a user joined and, much of the time, I found where they posted from. It’s not completely foolproof, thanks to the fact that VPNs can be used in remote locations by the user, but it never hurts to check. (Just so you know, The Patriot Post is indeed based in the United States. X says so.)
“When you read content on X, you should be able to verify its authenticity. This is critical for staying informed about important issues happening in the world,” explained Bier to Fox News. “Part of this is showing new information in accounts, including the country an account is located in, among other things.”
But let’s get back to the point Bonchie and Clandestine made. Who does it profit to split the MAGA movement and smear it with the charge of anti-Semitism? Why, of course, that would be our friends on the Left, who have their own troubles with the issue; that is, if you know what the phrase “from the river to the sea” means to them.
So if someone on X says something that seems too good to be true, now you can investigate a little further to see if it really is. In the meantime, there just might be a quiet exodus of these overseas accounts from X, and none too soon.
