X’s Book of Revelation
“American” coming to you live from … Pakistan?
Who is allowed to participate in American political debate online? If it were up to The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, contributions would be welcomed from verified Americans only.
“We cannot have a coherent or productive political debate if the dialogue includes a whole bunch of random foreigners from all across the world who have no stake in this country, no skin in the game, and no first hand [sic] knowledge of our culture at all. It is very important to identify the foreign intruders and bully them mercilessly until they shut up and leave us alone.”1
This is just the latest missile fired in the never-ending battle between political factions on social media. And its warhead was installed by Elon Musk and the team at X. To their credit — here’s something I’ve never said before — this was almost a good idea. Their new feature forces all accounts to display some location data: what region they’re posting from, what app store they downloaded from, and briefly, what country their account launched from.
It instantly unmasked hundreds of hyper-political accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers, known for fueling hyper-partisan drama. Ivanka Trump News? Nigeria. Karoline Leavitt News? Macedonia. The handle @American? Pakistan. This America First engagement bait account? Bangladesh. The ultimate “she doesn’t even go here” came from revelations that people who claimed to have voted in 2024 are running popular accounts registered abroad.
Here’s the problem: Right as the product rolled out, complaints of incorrect location data started rolling in. The X team, including their Head of Product Nikita Bier — who started working on this 10 days ago at the behest of a Fox News contributor — has already updated the feature to include a whole bunch of disclaimers about its imperfections. (Imagine your job not giving a fuck if you rolled out a product full of glitches to almost 600M monthly users globally … couldn’t be me).
But the creators on both sides are already reaping the benefits, stoking the flames, and suffering the consequences. I’m gonna walk you through the two biggest schools of bot (nice) and two glitches in the matrix. Then we’ll come back to test Matt’s stance above.
THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE
The foreign agitators: These accounts exist to create chaos.
Participants in the MAGA Civil War have been desperate to find a third party to pin their drama on in hopes of being able to move forward saying, “See, we’re not as far apart as people think we are.”
The emergence of hundreds of foreigners allows them the perfect pivot to blame a group with whom they are already at odds. Mainstream MAGA faithful are pointing to newly-unmasked foreign groyper accounts as evidence of manufactured dissent.
Liberals are also in the mix, pointing to tons of right-wing aligned accounts as sources of the mis- and disinformation that drove the 2024 election train off the tracks.
Essential factor: Regardless of who uses the revelations as an opportunity to assign blame for unwanted, lingering events, we are looking at a very real problem here when it comes to organized foreign intervention online. So many of these accounts are not acting alone — there are massive, coordinated influencing campaigns that originate in places like Macedonia or the vague “Eastern Europe (Non-EU)” … AKA Russia. Revealing an account’s location does feel like a good step toward identifying nefarious networks that are inflaming tensions on X, even if the platform refuses to do that itself.
The foreign profiteer: These accounts are motivated by engagement over ideology.
Elon Musk launched the X Creator Program in July 2023. And if you’ve ever heard someone complain that Twitter has deteriorated as a product since it became X, this is why. Acceptance into the creator program unlocks money in exchange for engagement. Welcome to the monetization of rage bait.
While Americans have complained that it’s not enough money to make a living, foreigners clocked that creating an American-passing account, in a vertical with minimal rules and guaranteed views, could bring them a very comfortable sum of money in places where the dollar stretches further — Nigeria, for instance.
So these are the accounts that don’t have a clear agenda to push. For example: while a foreign agitator account spends every day in groyper mode, like advocating for remigration of all immigrants regardless of legal status, a profiteer is posting things like “Can I get a ❤️ to say how beautiful Ivanka Trump is” or “DROP A HEART ❤️ IF YOU’RE STILL A PROUD MEMBER OF THE MAGA MOVEMENT!”
Essential factor: See what those two posts have in common? Direct engagement bait. They are openly asking for users to stop the scroll and interact with their content because every like, reply, repost, is another deposit in the bank.
I thought you might enjoy a curated poo-poo platter of content Morocco’s “MAGA Nadine” serves up to her 400,000 followers.
TWO REVELATIONS
Paging DHS Israel Division: In the early stages of the rollout, a couple screenshots and screen recordings went viral revealing the official Department of Homeland Security account (yeah, that one) is based in Israel. Kind of like … worst case scenario for everyone involved. X’s Head of Product said it was fake. DHS responded with — wow, shocker — a meme, and then said it was fake.2 But not before creators from across the ideological spectrum jumped on the story: The Young Turks, Kim Iversen, The Humanist Report, Sabby Sabs, etc.
Time to keep it real, girls: Open source intelligence analyst Tal Hagin put together an incredible thread of viral accounts that belong to “women” who post “I am from” content. They claim to be “from” all kinds of places: the US, Australia, Israel, Germany, the UK — all while having accounts registered, for the most part, in India and Pakistan. The women are frequently pictured in military fatigues and even more frequently celebrating their “birthday” or in the case of “Sophia,” both. I’d say it’s a remarkable coincidence that she and I share a birthday, but I’m sure many of you do too.
So to come back to Matt Walsh’s insistence that our political discourse doesn’t have room for anyone outside of the US: Now that we know these foreign actors are everywhere, and they do be acting, what happens next?
Elon remains sympathetic to border closures both real and virtual, but X hasn’t defined clear steps that close the door to hearing from everyone. And that’s for two good reasons:
Elon is reliant on X generating cash to help cover the $44B he put into the brand when he bought it and ad revenue dropped by 66.3%.
While Riley Gaines and Nikki Haley join Walsh in their demand to shrink the circle of discussion, there are a ton of people who have taken up the opposition: that foreigners are forced to engage in American politics because our government’s decisions have global effects. Holding that line is Substacker Michael Tracey, a popular leftist account now revealed to be in Thailand, a former doctor who lives “in exile in the Brazilian jungle” for his beliefs, and Brick Suit — the guy who wore a brick suit to hundreds of Trump rallies who I met at the RNC.
LOOSE ENDS:
📰 Something you should read today: If you’re just itching for more on the big Twitter reveal, head to The Bulwark to read False Flag — New X Games: Legitimate Groyper or Bangladeshi Bot? by Will Sommer.
🕵️ Someone you should know today: I went to go hear Emily Sundberg interview W. David Marx about his new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. I’m waiting until I’m on vacation to dive in so I can actually dedicate my full brain to it (unlike the half-brain I exercise while writing this newsletter). But I had a question that sprang out of Marx’s argument that New Yorkers tend to overindex our influence and importance nationally. Did he, as someone who lives in Japan, think Americans are overindexing our influence globally? So I basically demanded he give me his email to ask him. Here’s his response:
“In general, Americans are still overindexing their influence on the world. I just watched four episodes of The Chair Company, which I liked, but I can’t imagine would have any appeal at all to someone outside of North America. The idea of America and its historical legacy still has power, but maybe less so contemporary culture. American celebs, Hollywood films, internet platforms, however, dominate without much true competition.”
🥹 Something to make you smile today: If you didn’t know Tucker Carlson was on Dancing With The Stars in 2006 … now you know. I’m truly floored by this.
I just have to say, never in my life did I think I would have to address something Matt Walsh has said this frequently.
Users were quick to discover and point out that ICE does have an outpost in Tel-Aviv.
This is the definition of "Who Broke It"