Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
Speaking of foreign actors...
A lot of these "patriot" accounts on X which purport to hate US support of Israel are not actually Americans. It's been found that many originate from Pakistan.
In fact, one of the more obnoxious one was exposed earlier this year. This account purported to be a US military veteran who was disgusted to see money spent on Israel after "I fought for this country".
This irritated some X employee so much that he looked up the guy's account info, and leaked it to his buddy who then posted it. Indeed, it was a Pakistani, and when confronted, the guy refused to admit or deny it. LOL! To this day he continues with the propaganda, though.
Anyway, X is in the process of rolling out a change which will show:
1) The country of the account
2) Whether the account is connected via a VPN (meaning the country shouldn't be believed)
3) How many screen name changes the account has had
So this way if a "patriot" is always connected from a VPN and has had 3 different screen names, it will be obvious it's a foreign actor.
I use similar technology on PFA to block out bot attacks and AI scraping here, which bog down the site. I wrote these routines myself, so I'm not sure what's taking X so long to do it. In fact, people aren't even allowed to register new accounts if I detect they're connected from a VPN, and certain entire countries are banned from connecting to the site at all.