Good day all. Friday, November 21st, Elon Musk blew a number of TwitterX accounts out of the water. He didn’t delete them. He turned on a setting that let people see where the tweets were actually posted from.
Surprising no one, people claiming to be in Gaza witnessing war crimes were no where near Gaza. There were a number of other accounts that were also shown to be frauds. Here are the details from Fox News:
A new feature on Elon Musk’s X is exposing the truth behind social media accounts across the political spectrum, with account owners apparently misleading followers about where they are posting from.
The new feature allows all X users to inspect where a given account is based, usually listing a country or region. Many popular accounts posing as American “patriots” or “constitutionalists” have been exposed as being run from foreign countries since the update rolled out on Friday.
I only heard about this feature on Sunday and I’ve been playing with it. I’ve found one that is questionable, however, the person could be traveling. I did test it on myself and yes, I am in the United States of Freaking America!!
One account with the handle “@1776General_” boasts over 140,000 followers and has a user biography describing the owner as a “constitutionalist, patriot and ethnically American.” The biography claims the account is based in the U.S., but X’s new feature reveals it is actually based in Turkey.
The owner of the account did make excuses once it came to light that he was posting in Turkey.
“I work in international business. I’m currently working in Turkey on a contract,” the owner of the account posted after the new feature was released.
Another account, “@AmericanVoice__” had over 200,000 followers before the update rolled out. The new feature exposed that it was being run from South Asia, and the owners simply deleted the account.
It wasn’t just a number of fake Americans. One of the more notable groups were all the accounts claiming they were in Gaza. That has turned out not to be the case.
The phenomenon is not limited to American politics, however. Many accounts claiming to have been reporting on alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza also appear to be misleading users.
One user, Motasm A Dalloul, uses the handle “@AbujomaaGaza” and claims to be a “Gaza-based journalist.” His account has over 197,000 followers, but X says the owner is actually posting from Poland.
Dalloul has pushed back on claims that he is lying to his followers, however, posting a video on Saturday that appeared to show him on the ground in Gaza. Many users have argued about whether the video was digitally altered.
I wonder if this clown is under contract to the Palestinian Ministry of Health – Gaza?
Another Palestinian-related account, the Quds News Network or @QudsNen, describes itself as the “largest independent Palestinian youth news network” and has over 600,000 followers.
599,827 of which are bots.
The account lists its location as “Palestine,” but X says the account is actually based out of Egypt – unlike other accounts that X does list as being based in “Palestine,” such as American-Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti.
First off, there is no such place as Palestine and never had been. The problem with the system is when it makes a mistake. One person this is happening to is the noted former State Department office, The Diplomad. Looking at his profile, it reports that his account in ins Spain.
Now the “Diplowife” is Spanish and the couple do travel to Spain several times a year to visit her family. However, their home is in North Carolina. When I looked a bit deeper into the tool, it popped up a message saying that it can show that an account is hosted elsewhere if the owner is traveling. It’s possible that this is the case for this QudsNen terrorist propaganda organ.
X representatives have said its new feature could be partially spoofed by using a VPN to mask a user’s true location. In such cases where a VPN was detected, X added a warning next to the listed location.
Obviously, the system is not perfect and Elon Musk makes no claims that it is. However, it does provide some guidance on a number of questionable accounts. I’m sure that the tool will become more accurate as time goes on. In the meantime, it’s been very helpful in embarrassing a number of frauds claiming to be something or somewhere they are not and never have been.
Thatisall
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