X.com Is Gonna Snitch You Out to the Public If You Use a VPN

Yeah. This feature seems mostly fine, and fairly effective at highlighting troll farms.

There's been a whole slew of the most prolific accounts that were spamming inflamatory political propaganda, ostensibly targeting Europe or the US that have been reveal to operate out of India, Pakistan, south east asia, etc.

> Or theres a lot of people who like to troll and propagandize americans for nationalism and racism

I think it's a more coordinated and professional operation that you are suggesting. The US and even western Europe in general has been constantly hammered by Russian bots and professional accounts spewing all sort of extremist and sensationalized content that is aligned with the Kremlin's agenda. It's not limited to Twitter too, as places such as Reddit's conservative subreddit is renowned for being mainly a Russian psyop with barely any US citizen posting there.

that happened like 3 years ago THOUGH

Self-hosting a VPN is not entirely straightforward. If you rent a server from Hetzner, for example, and your IP address is linked to Hetzner, it's obvious that it's not a genuine residential IP address.

What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.

Hosting your VPN is a fair bit of work. Plus, you need residential IP too which you don't really have if you host on any Cloud Provider. I had the same issue and decided to build TunnelBuddy.net so that a friend can share their internet connection with me or vice versa. It is entirely P2P and requires no sign up, no credit card. You download the app, share a code and that's it. It is like TeamViewer, bit instead of sharing your screen you share your Internet Connection.

Websites can still guess that an IP is non-residential. There's a difference between an IP at Comcast and an IP at DigitalOcean. This takes some effort to work around.

There are tons of services like maxmind that can just tell you the origin of an IP - whether it is a datacenter one or a residential one.

It's not a lot of effort to make them appear as if connecting from the USA without the use of VPN. Giving them a label based on their ... current proxy? ... is not a solution at all.

Such groups certainly have the resources to use residential proxies to fool such checks.

actually incredibly bullish for america.

everybody wants to be american. nobody with agency is rooting for anything other than the US. seriously, if youre not topblasting the S&P, i dont know what to tell you. theres like the entire 2nd and 3rd world combined waiting for their paycheque to come in every month so they can spend it on the US.

by 2100, we are gonna have a graveyard of langauges that nobody speaks anymore.

We've known this is a thing for quite some while. The Russians have been running a bunch of these propaganda accounts at least as far back as the 2016 election (see the Mueller report).

This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.

It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.

Companies requiring that you use potentially poor privacy and security protocols isn't a good thing. Using a VPN doesn't make one a bot or a spammer.

I agree it is a good thing.

These so-called "America First" and "MEGA" accounts have been driving a wedge within the conservative party for a while. Many speculated that these were largely foreign accounts, but it was hard to prove, until now.

Many of the racist "conservative" voices are being shown to be from Iran or other countries.

Now do the pro-Gaza influencers.

I'm not as sure and would want to consider the angles a bit more.

I ponder how effective this would be against an adversary sufficiently motivated to look like they're not using a VPN. And then does it result in a false sense of trust, since a user thinks the system more reliably detects a VPN then it does. Or an adversary who has bypassed the system to then point to it to build additional trust.

I would say that privacy conscious people simply gave up on contributing and commenting. Non privacy conscious are those who are public figures anyway like politicians or journalists. Trolls turned more sophisticated and vicious as they are compensated and oftentimes threatened to do so.

Do you think this wouldnt be happening on both sides of the political spectrum?

Whatever right to privacy that may exist goes out the window when you’re posting on the World Wide Web.

I think it is reasonable to expect privacy when reading social media. Not so much when posting routinely to millions of people while claiming to be some non-anonymous person you aren’t.

Does the distinction not make sense from your perspective?

Most people are terrible at determining how authentic or truthful a post is. So not data to help them do that is helpful.

The crusade against VPNs is grating to me too. But as long as X is not actually restricting VPN users in any way?

"A guy that posts popular incendiary takes about US politics like it's his job is routing through VPNs and his real location is unknown" might be valuable information to the public.

I think, in regimes with total metadata surveillance, the only authentic online speech will rely on reassurance that the handset won’t be able to be tracked down. Without that condition, I have multiple reasons to devalue the speech, even if only a little.

And I think that the Nazi-salute guy who runs Twitter is playing a game with this.

X's program? They're not doing this to earn money. They're trying to sow division in the US, and they've been very successful.

> That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.

I recall that Twitter had a serious account takeover problem which reached the point that eve high profile accounts were hijacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking

Of course owners of dead accounts don't complain.

The way Elon Musk's Twitter decided to render blue checkmarks useless leads me to believe this is by design.

It’s very difficult to know what the median VPN user would do without one. For some people, it’s not an afterthought and those people are the ones with valuable opinions.

I suppose this could target people who use DNS other than, say, the biggest ten.

That would explain why the new location feature doesn't work for that account. I suspect that's also why the feature went live and then was immediately taken down. When it came back up, the locations of certain accounts were hidden. More info:

https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1p4i95z/the_off...