OPINION — A new location transparency feature on X is revealing foreign influence on American discourse just as federal agencies designed to deal with such threats are being dismantled.
Toward the end of November, X began listing account locations in the “About this account” section of people’s (or bots’) profiles. X also can list the platform through which users access the social media site, such as the web app or a region-specific app store.
With these new transparency features, X exposed that major MAGA influencers are likely operating from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. And while anti-Trump profiles posing as Americans on X haven’t made headlines, the authors found one listing itself in Charlotte, NC that X indicates connected via the Nigeria App Store.
One factor driving foreign accounts to masquerade as domestic political commentators could be commercial gain. Heated political debate, abundant in the United States, drives engagement, which can be monetized. Account owners posing as Americans may also be funded or operated by America’s adversaries who seek to shape votes, increase social divisions, or achieve other strategic goals.
The problem of foreign adversaries pretending to be American is not new. During the cold war, Soviet KGB agents even posed as KKK members and sent hate mail to Olympic athletes before the 1984 summer Olympics. What is different now is the scale and speed of influence operations. The internet makes it dramatically easier for foreign adversaries to pose as Americans and infiltrate domestic discourse.
The past decade provides countless examples of Russia, China, and Iran targeting Americans with online influence operations. In 2022, a Chinese operation masqueraded as environmental activists in Texas to stoke protests against rare earth processing plants. Iran posed as the Proud Boys to send voters threatening emails before the 2020 elections. In 2014, Russia spread a hoax about a chemical plant explosion in Louisiana.
X’s new country of origin feature is a step in the right direction for combatting these operations. Using it, a BBC investigation revealed that multiple accounts advocating for Scottish independence connect to the platform via the Iran Android App. On first blush, this makes little sense. But Iran has a documented history of promoting Scottish independence through covert online influence operations and a track record of sowing discord wherever it can.
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Disclosing origin alone paints an incomplete picture. Identifying an account’s location does not always tell you who directs or funds the account. For example, Russia has previously outsourced its attempts to influence Americans to operators in Ghana and Nigeria. America’s adversaries continue to leverage proxies in their operations, as seen in a recently exposed Nigerian YouTube network aggressively spreading pro-Kremlin narratives.
Additionally, malign actors will likely still be able to spoof their location on X. Virtual private networks (VPNs) mask a user’s real IP address, and while X appears to flag suspected VPN use, the platform may have a harder time detecting residential proxies, which route traffic through a home IP address. Sophisticated operators and privacy enthusiasts will likely find additional ways to spoof their location. For example, TikTok tracks user locations but there are easy-to-find guides on how to change one’s apparent location.
The additional data points provided by X’s transparency feature, therefore, do not provide a shortcut to attributing a nation-state or other malign actor behind an influence operation. Proper attribution still requires thorough investigation, supported by both regional and technical expertise.
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Social media platforms, private companies, and non-profits play a significant role in combatting online influence operations. Platforms have access to internal data — such as emails used to create an account and other technical indicators — that allow them to have a fuller picture about who is behind an account. Non-profits across the United States, Europe, Australia, and other aligned countries have also successfully exposed many influence operations in the past purely through open-source intelligence.
The U.S. government, however, plays a unique role in countering influence operations. Only governments have the authority to issue subpoenas, access sensitive sources, and impose consequences through sanctions and indictments.
Washington, however, has significantly reduced its capabilities to combat foreign malign influence. Over the past year, it has dismantled the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, shut down the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and effectively dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. These changes make it unclear who — if anyone — within the U.S. government oversees countering influence operations undermining American interests at home and abroad.
X’s new transparency feature reveals yet again that America’s adversaries are waging near-constant warfare against Americans on the devices and platforms that profoundly shape our beliefs and behaviors. Now the U.S. government must rebuild its capacity to address it.
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