Elon Musk has lastly performed one thing good with X, even when it wasn’t essentially the purpose. Over the weekend, his social media firm rolled out a brand new coverage that permits customers to see not solely when an X account was created, but in addition the place the account is from.
The brand new function has led quite a few pro-Donald Trump and pro-MAGA accounts to be unwittingly uncovered as overseas trolls—who’ve had nice success amassing followers and thus funds from Musk’s creator fund by capitalizing on the simply manipulated rubes within the Republican base.
“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,” Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, wrote in a submit on the social media platform.
The account pushes voter fraud lies and posts questions looking for enter from its followers about whether or not Democrats must be prosecuted. But it surely additionally despatched a submit that slammed america’ help of Ukraine—which ought to have been an indication all alongside that the account was not on the extent.
An Ivanka Trump fan web page that had greater than 1 million followers was suspended after it was uncovered as being from Nigeria. So too had been quite a few accounts that presupposed to be enticing, Trump-supporting white ladies however had been truly from locations like Thailand and Myanmar.
Exposing these accounts as overseas trolls is the primary good factor Musk has performed since he took over the platform—which has devolved right into a disinformation hotbed crammed with antisemitic, racist, and different discriminatory content material.
Actually, the Centre for Info Resilience did a examine throughout the 2024 election that mentioned simply how harmful the faux MAGA accounts had been. However now that customers will be capable of see the place these accounts are from, their faux content material may very well be referred to as out earlier than it spreads.
