Many prominent Maga personalities on X are based outside US, new tool reveals | US politics
A new transparency feature on the social media site has revealed that many of the most influential personalities in the “Make America great again” (Maga) movement in X are based outside the United States, including Russia, Nigeria and India.
The new tool, called “About this account”, was offered to users of Elon Musk’s platform on Friday. It allows anyone to see where an account is located, when they joined the platform, how often their username is changed, and how app X is downloaded.
As soon as the update was released, users found that numerous Magas and right-wing influencers who presented themselves as patriotic Americans were operating from other countries.
“This is one of the best days on this platform” wrote Liberal influencer Harry Sisson. “Seeing all these MAGA accounts exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats like me and the many others here who have warned about this.”
The MAGANationX account, which has approximately 400,000 followers and whose bio reads “Patriotic Voice of We the People”, is actually managed from Eastern Europe. Daily Monster. Another popular profile, Ivanka Trump fan account IvankaNews, which has nearly a million followers and frequently posts about illegal immigration, Islam and support for Trump, was revealed to be based in Nigeria.
Another user also out in the open a few additional cases. Dark Maga, a smaller account with around 15,000 followers, is run from Thailand. MAGA Scope, which has over 51,000 followers, operates in Nigeria, while MAGA Beacon is headquartered in South Asia.
Users on Reddit have also joined the effort to expose their origins by posting examples of accounts that appear to be misrepresenting their origins. One reddit The user posted a screenshot of a woman who claimed to live in Texas but appeared to be in Russia instead. user The person mentioned in the post appears to have a location in the United States. In the comments many people posted other examples they found.
Bots that spread misinformation and propaganda are a long-standing problem on Twitter; This problem has gotten significantly worse since Musk bought it in October 2022 and then renamed it X. AI chatbot Grok has also been found to frequently make and amplify false claims.
