Elon Musk’s X Now Disclosing Where Accounts Are Based. All Hell Breaks Loose.

Over the weekend, X (formerly Twitter) rolled out a major transparency feature called “About This Account,” which publicly displays an account’s home location, join date, username-change history, and all hell broke loose.

The purpose, according to the company, was to give users enough context to identify inauthentic behavior, spot foreign influence, and distinguish real users from coordinated bot activity. Verified government accounts with grey checkmarks are exempt “to prevent acts of terrorism against government leaders,” an X official said.

The location data could be influenced by travel, temporary locations, or the use of virtual private networks (VPNs), X said over the weekend.

Within hours of the feature’s release, the social media platform told users that many of the most prominent “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) accounts were not American at all but were operating from Russia, Nigeria, India, Thailand, Pakistan, and other foreign hubs.

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said a Monday update to the feature would make it “nearly 99.99%” accurate.

“Cyber-enabled influence operations function on common principles that can be understood through an identification-imitation-amplification framework,” Scientific American explains. “First, ‘outsiders’ (malicious actors) identify target audiences and divisive issues through social media microtargeting. Following this, the ‘outsiders’ may pose as members of the target audience by assuming false identities, through imitation which increases their credibility.”

“’Fake MAGA’ accounts co-opt MAGA and ‘America First’ branding to attract the same target audiences, yet our research has traced this activity to coordinated bot farms,” the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) reported. “These operations emerge swiftly, often within 48 hours of  high-profile crises, and consistently use scripted tactics. Though these accounts often appear to  echo or profess MAGA values at surface level, they frequently disseminate narratives aligned  with adversarial foreign propaganda.”

Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday.

This pattern extended beyond U.S. politics. The same location-reveal feature exposed global inauthentic networks: accounts posing as Gazan journalists, raising funds for supposed war victims, or engaging in anti-Israel activism, but actually operating from Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, or the United States. Israeli social media researchers noted large anti-Israel or “Gaza journalist” accounts tweeting from Pakistan and Bangladesh while pretending to be Western or Middle Eastern civilians. These findings demonstrated that X’s new tool was surfacing cross-issue bot networks, many of which appeared to serve overlapping geopolitical aims.

According to NCRI, these networks activate rapidly after crises—mass shootings, terror attacks, political scandals, or even natural disasters—injecting false-flag narratives, conspiracy claims, and divisive misinformation within minutes. One activation window produced 650,000 posts pushing false-flag claims with nearly four million interactions, fueled by Kremlin propaganda nodes, bot farms, and domestic influencers unknowingly amplifying messages seeded by foreign intelligence services. The same networks later pivoted to attack Donald Trump directly, accusing him of corruption or immoral behavior after a public rift between Trump and Elon Musk, revealing that the objective was not to support MAGA but to use its symbols to destabilize the movement.

This strategy fits a broader pattern outlined by analysts studying cyber-enabled influence operations, which follow a cycle of identification, imitation, and amplification. Foreign actors identify divisive issues, impersonate members of the target community, and amplify polarizing messages at scale—often through AI-generated personas, as shown by the Russian AI-driven bot farm targeted by the DOJ in 2024.

X’s new location transparency has made many of these impostors and bot farms visible for the first time, confirming what researchers have long warned: that numerous loud online voices claiming to represent MAGA or broader American conservatism were foreign-run operations aimed at fracturing U.S. political coalitions, sowing distrust, and undermining national unity.