Twitter outs the MAGA-fluencers
Last weekend Twitter did an intentional oops, created an unholy mess, and now the mask is unveiled. The MAGA verse isn't fed by nefarious state actors, but is instead stoked by ordinary people farming for influence to improve their lot in life. Delish!
On my professional blog, not long after Twitter was bought by that South African wanker, I wrote a few posts about what that fucking dick-hole Musk did/was doing to it. It sorta began with this:
Geoffrey Anderson
If you go there and search for "Twitter" you will see a series I did from late 2022, through early spring 2023, before I finally said "Fuck it" and deleted all my accounts there[1], and I promised that I wouldn't write about it again (over there, not here 😃).
That has led to more than two years of improved mental health, at least until the advent of Substack Notes, and the 2025 fuckery they are doing algorithmically to put their fingers on the scale to emphasize engagement over serving up what my curated feed used to deliver.
But this weekend there was a ripple in the Force, and the brainiac Musk decided that he was going to add some new information in the profiles of Twitter[2] user's accounts, in the interest of "transparency".
Thus, starting Friday night, November 22, Twitter added two fields to the "about" for accounts, where it was created, and where it posts from.
Seems innoculous, right? I mean, I always put my home city in my Twitter profile (and when I was on Facebook/Insta/etc) because, why the fuck wouldn't I?
Alas, that has created an absolute shit-storm in the MAGA sphere, as it turns out that a LOT of the most egregious, over the top, ultra America First, MAGA promotion, anti Libtard (or is it "shitlib" this season?) accounts were based in eastern Europe, Africa (Nigeria is a hotspot, gee, just like the Nigerian scammers), Pakistan and other places.
I wasn't going to do more than chuckle about this privately, but alas, the media I read have been all over this.
Rick Wilson wrote a solid post (alas, paywalled):
Rick Wilson
MAGA is a foreign influence operation.
Not “incidental to MAGA,” not touching it,” not “nudging it,” not “occasionally exploiting it.” MAGA is a foreign influence operation, root and branch.
While pundits spent more time this weekend than anyone should on RFK Jr’s uh erotic poetry to Olivia Nuzzi (and by that, I mean SWEET JESUS BLEACH IT FROM MY BRAIN), we learned foreign influence operations are at the tweeting, bleating heart of the MAGA moment.
MAGA is not just a political movement of goateed, 50-ish white dudes who all rock that same avatar of them copping what they imagine is an expression of manly vigor in the front seat of their behind-on-the-payments Ford F-350.
It’s a delivery system.
A supply chain for chaos that starts in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing, runs through bot farms in industrial parks outside St. Petersburg or the Pardis Technology Park north of Tehran, or some Nigerian click farm, or a Chinese-criminal-owned social media and tech scam prison in the wilds of Burma, bounces off a rage-merchant influencer “from Ohio” who has never set foot in America, and ends up in your pissed off MAGA uncle’s Facebook feed as a “patriotic truth.”
That is solid.
The Washington Post gets in on the action too:
This gifted link is an opinion piece arguing that we really need digital borders to protect democracy...
Social platforms fundamentally changed how people and ideas move across borders. A borderless digital ecosystem shrank distances, opened markets and created the potential for a global town square. Those benefits are profound, and worth preserving. But when political conversation moved online, one assumption baked into that early design became dangerously outdated: that geography no longer matters. Social platforms elevated voices globally by making geography invisible, but in the process left users without a clear sense of where content was coming from.
That vacuum made it effortless for foreign actors to pose as Americans and amplify divisive narratives to stoke internal conflict. Today, a U.S. adversary needs only an account that looks, sounds and behaves like a voter in Michigan, New York or Texas to infiltrate the digital border and try to influence domestic views. These accounts strike at highly controversial issues across left and right, such as assassinations or mayoral elections, as well as heated foreign policy issues, whether in Ukraine or Venezuela or Gaza.
X’s recent bold decision, led by Head of Product Nikita Bier, to add country labels to accounts reflects an important shift: a recognition that geographic transparency is crucial context to help users understand whether a post is a firsthand account or distant commentary, whether it reflects genuine local sentiment or coordinated foreign messaging. After all, posts from the “Ivanka Trump News” account with 1 million followers feel very different once you learn the account is posting from Nigeria.
Good luck with that fellas...
But what really made me crank this out was when Garrett Graff pened this outstanding piece on how profitable it is to lie to us:
Garrett Graff
First, if you aren't reading Garret, you should. He's free, and he writes cogently about politics and how they intertwine with society. Posts about weekly, and every one is a banger.
In recent days, we’ve gotten an important reminder that, because it’s lucrative for the platforms to polarize us, they have also made it lucrative for users who polarize us.
In perhaps the only good thing Elon Musk has done since he bought Twitter, he made public the “location” feature that showed where accounts on X were actually based. MAGA online has been roiled by the not-altogether-surprising result that many of far-right’s loudest and most outrageous MAGA, pro-Trump, “America First” accounts actually turn out to be based overseas — in Nigeria, Russia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.
...
We spend a lot of time worrying about “foreign influence campaigns,” Russian bots, and the like without properly recognizing that much of the enraging slop we see in our newsfeeds on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere is there not because of the nefarious fingers of Vladimir Putin or the Chinese Communist Party but because it’s profitable.
We spend so much time fixating on how these efforts are corrosive to society and driving the hyperpartisanship that infects us tying it to regimes like Russia or China, but the reality is that engagement farming, while not profitable for a western country citizen to make a living off of (a good account on Twitter can make a couple hundred bucks a month if they drive enough outrage and engagement), for places like Nigeria, Lahore Pakistan, and Croatia, it can be a solid income.
AI tools can help them craft messages that will strike these audiences in the bullseye, and it so happens that the Twitter algorithm, being finely tuned to Musk's caustic beliefs, and a huge pool of Trumpy MAGA folks is ripe for exploitation.
The kimono being opened up for just a few hours allowed researchers and sleuths to unmask a lot of this shit.
But will it cause your racist Trumper uncle to rethink his devotion to his favorite MAGA accounts on Twitter?
Nah.
Garret links to this Bluesky thread, and it's worth digging through:
X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand. The photos were stolen from European models & posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people.
— Benjamin Strick (@bendobrown.bsky.social) 2025-11-23T12:54:58.536Z
I have been saving for last Ryan Broderick's take, because after reading his last 'graph, I need a smoke...[3]
From Garbage Day:
The right-wing maniacs that call X, the everything app, home spent the weekend in free fall as they learned that all of their favorite accounts, like @cb_doge, @America_First0, and @InvankaNews_ were all being run out of countries like India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Macedonia. If you’ve never heard of any of these accounts, that’s ok, it just means you have friends and family who care about you.
...
The update also finally, without question, confirmed that right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong does not live in the US. He was long believed to be based in Malaysia, but it actually turns out he’s currently posting from the United Arab Emirates. “X isn’t America only. Go to Truth Social if you want that,” Cheong wrote on X. To which right-wing influencer Matt Walsh replied, “You've never set foot in America and yet you spend every day trying to influence our culture and politics. You talk about our country exclusively and never say a word about your own. If you don't see why that might rub Americans the wrong way, I don't know what to tell you.”
Just delish. But the coup d'grace is this banger:
Republicans became so obsessed with Twitter that they pressured and even helped fund Elon Musk’s purchase of it in 2022. And since its been rebranded as X, they’ve only become more reliant on it, at the expense of both the platform’s business and cultural relevance. Now they can’t really function without it, like the poor souls still posting on 4chan or Neopets. They use X to coordinate propaganda, create policy, and as a jobs board for Trump’s second administration. Using its likes and shares in the place of actual leadership. And now we know that a staggering amount of the accounts Republicans have been relying on for viral feedback are either apolitical con artists milking their hatred for clicks or pitiful anonymous fascists LARPing America’s culture war because they can’t wage one at home. And from where I’m sitting, all this isn’t proof that shadowy foreign actors are destroying America. It’s proof that the American right has spent better part of the last decade letting algorithmic spam tell them what they want to hear, astroturfing themselves into believing that some silent majority out there believes in their worthless MAGA crusade. When all they were doing was chasing the approval of faceless accounts who realized their political movement was so hollow, so braindead simple, so spiritually worthless that they could easily earn a few Musk bucks by posting AI-generated photos of blonde women in American flag bikinis promising a Thousand Year Burger Reich.
That is about the perfect encapsulation of the entire MAGA ecosystem that has captured the attention of your Boomer and Gen X friends and parents/relatives (and it pains me to include Gen X, being on the oldest end of that generation).
The schadenfreude is running strong this week.
1 - I had three accounts. A personal account that I used mostly to interact with the Product Management community, one that was for my professional PM blog, and one for my secret, snarky blog. I kept the account active for my professional blog the longest, and by the time I tossed in the towel every time I logged in I was presented with a wall of adult videos (yes, out and out porn)
2 - I will deadname twitter until I die.
3 - I don't smoke, but I might start for this shit.
