Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors.

The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app.

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.

In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      9 hours ago

      I don’t think many of them pretend to be American pushing America First. I think you’d find that most of them would call themselves globalists in fact.

      That said, I always find it funny that Lemmings are shocked to realize the Marxist-Leninists are often from Russia and have Russian or Chinese viewpoints.

      • cub Gucci@lemmy.today
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        9 hours ago

        I’m kinda offended by this. Lefties, die-hard Marxists in Russia are not pro-Russia and definitely not pro-China.

        Also, I rarely see any Russians here, on Lemmy. I have subscribed for several groups, but it’s everything Lemmy has.

  • Inucune@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Maga people are reverting back to 'I don’t like/want to talk about politics."

    Nature is healing stagnating again.

  • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    Just like the one time reddit released its statistics and the top location was from a US army base.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094911/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html

    That was in 2013. Reddit stopped publishing these stats after this. Imagine how large the astroturfing is now.

    Yakistanis who think it’s everyone against them is fucking poetic.

    Have some of your own medicine, why don’t you?

  • ZeroGravitas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    “Accidentally” my foot, the one with bells on it. The engineers knew.

    Whether Elon knew and green-lit it, or even ordered the move as payback for his unceremonious departure from DOGE is anyone’s guess. But I stand by what I said earlier, this was intentional - and more power to whoever pushed it to production.

    • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      I think it was intentional and killed many birds with one stone - ie: trying to cover his ass in other countries to show that shitter is being transparent, shooting the maga boat that’s already sinking.

  • xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
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    1 day ago

    I don’t think this is much of a surprise to anyone. What’s more interesting to me is that X/Twitter just proved they had the information to know this was going on all along and consequently must have chosen not to intervene. That should raise serious questions of the legal variety.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      This is actually exactly why Musk did it. It’s not a good faith attempt at transparency… It’s straight up “cover your ass” liability shifting. X has been accused of unfettered propaganda in recent election cycles, and this is just an attempt to go “hey, it’s the user’s fault if they fall for the propaganda. All of the info was there for them to find.”

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Not to anyone who’s been paying attention. I just met another tankie who professes to have no idea about it so the more common knowledge the better.

    • jimmy90@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      this might be surprising to the privacy paranoids that don’t want verified and validated online accounts so that authentic online interactions can sweep away the russian bots

      when will lemmy do the same? we will see the same patterns me thinks

  • Tom Arrr@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Wasn’t one of his biggest complaints when he bought Twitter was the number of bot accounts? That went well. And I’m assuming most pay $5 month, so he’s making bank from them.

  • Guy Ingonito@reddthat.com
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    1 day ago

    The world’s richest man is paying people in developing countries to stoke racism and division in the US is a factual statement

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Hey, would you look at that.

    The FBI’s first and foremost job is national security interests, particularly on identifing foreign actors in the state. The feds got played lmfao