Musk’s new feature exposes fraud: ‘The number of ‘MAGA’ accounts not from America is staggering’

A new feature on X exposes the reality of an ongoing “grey war” with a “mob of foreigners” seeking to influence American issues on social media.

When Elon Musk took over the platform, then called Twitter, as a free speech absolutist with the intent to topple censorship, he also took steps to address the volume of bot accounts. Last week’s rollout of the “About This Account” feature exposed the extent of activity from overseas looking to sway domestic politics, especially from either side of the Make America Great Again movement.

Whether by displaying the country the account was based in, such as nations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, or calling out the use of a VPN to attempt to mask that location, even verified accounts were among those seemingly misrepresenting themselves.

Writer and investigator Eitan Fischberger was one of numerous users with threads highlighting some of the suspected bad actors, including accounts in Eastern Europe, Nigeria and the United Kingdom that presented themselves as MAGA, “The number of ‘MAGA’ accounts not from America is staggering. Half of the U.S.-focused discourse on X is just the Third World talking to itself,” while others behaved as though they were American Democrats.

Similarly, while attorney Marina Medvin called out, “LOL a large chunk of the pro-MAGA and anti-MAGA accounts are foreign interferes. The internet is so thickly full of fraud,” Red State’s Bonchie addressed some of the impact this was having as he argued, “90% of the ‘GOP civil war over Israel’ stuff has been pushed by foreign accounts that got exposed last night. The other 10% has been Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. It’s all astroturfed. Almost no one in real life considers it a major issue, regardless of their position.”

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Likewise, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh weighed in on what it means for so many to misrepresent themselves with an end goal of shifting the political landscape.

“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 knowledge of our culture at all,” the conservative commentator wrote. “It is very important to identify the foreign intruders and bully them mercilessly until they shut up and leave us alone. We cannot talk about or fix any of our problems with a mob of foreigners constantly barging into the conversation.”

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Given that the issue was not limited to American politics, Scottish Member of Parliament Graeme Downie spoke with the UK Defence Journal amid similar influence being exposed abroad and said the data “confirms what we already knew that Iran, as well as countries such as Russia and our other enemies, are actively seeking to subvert our democracy and discourse in Scotland and the UK.”

“We are already in a grey war with our enemies, and this is further proof of that,” he added.

With an eye on correcting the problem, The Babylon Bee’s Managing Editor Joel Berry, whose satirical site is widely seen as the catalyst for Musk’s Twitter purchase, leading to the current debate after a joke resulted in censorship, suggested, “We need legislation to prevent VPN companies from allowing foreign actors to use American IP addresses.”

Meanwhile, X Head of Product Nikita Bier indicated, “There are a few rough edges that will be resolved by Tuesday. If any data is incorrect, it will be updated periodically based on the best available information. This happens on a delayed and randomized schedule to preserve privacy.”

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Kevin Haggerty

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