Musk's network X began to show where users' accounts originate from. Those American ones are often perhaps from Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa.
Elon Musk's social network X did not disclose where the accounts of those who present and communicate here come from until recently. Thankfully, this changed at the end of November. Thanks to this, we can now find out for example, that accounts that pretended to be related to some American or European politicians are actually operated from one of the countries of the former Soviet Union or even from Asia. Also, one of the Slovak politicians had his account registered from Russia.
Platform X launched a tool that allows users to display the country or region where the account is located.
"This is an important first step in ensuring the integrity of the global square. We plan to give users many more ways to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X,"
Product director of the X network, Nikita Bier, wrote about this.
American accounts are sometimes not American at all
Researchers from the organization NewsGuard, which tracks online disinformation, have already identified several popular accounts that were allegedly operated by Americans interested in politics, but the reality was different - they were based in Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa. They were the main spreaders of some misleading and polarizing assertions about American politics, including those that claimed that Democrats bribed the moderators of the presidential debate in 2024. A verified account of a certain Ron Smith with the subtitle "Proud Democrat" with 52 thousand followers, for example, claimed that he was circumventing voters in Pennsylvania and knocking on their doors to choose Kamala Harris for president. But this "Ron Smith" was posting his contributions from Kenya. Online detectives and experts quickly discovered thanks to a new function that many popular accounts, which publish posts in support of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, that is, Make America Great Again, and have thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, are located outside the United States. This, of course, raises concerns about where American foreign policy might also be headed.
Everything can be circumvented
Our Slovak neighbors know all about it. Former Fico's Minister of Justice and unsuccessful candidate for Slovak president in 2019 and 2024 Štefan Harabin joined the network already in 2010. However, as it turned out in November, he joined via the "Russian Federation application for Android". This politician appealed to the fact that he supposedly joined the platform via WiFi during November in Moscow, where he was at the International Scientific and Practical Forum.
Experts state that the new service in many cases is unable to display a specific country, but only a region. This is a problem particularly for those states that restrict freedom of speech or exhibit other traits typical of repressive regimes. Users can also utilize services like a virtual private network or VPN to mask their actual location on the X network due to, for instance, some internet providers using proxy servers automatically, without user intervention. Therefore, it is also displayed for many that the data about their location is not entirely accurate.
Fraud Reduced the Overall Brand Attractiveness
Previously, fraudulent information for users in connection with the so-called blue tick for accounts was also a target of criticism. This so-called checkmark meant that the account of company X, formerly known as Twitter, was verified. It was used by politicians, celebrities or media. Gradually, however, it lost credibility. Currently, this designation can be purchased as part of X Premium.
Another frequently discussed point was that the X network has so far not provided sufficient space for researchers. They often have access only to partial or unreliable data, which affects their ability to investigate, for example, whether users, including minors, are exposed to illegal or harmful content. Therefore, the European Commission has also already accused the American internet network X of billionaire Elon Musk of violating EU rules, specifically the European Union's Digital Services Regulation, and fined it 120 million euros, or approximately 3 billion crowns. Compared to the total value of the X brand, however, these are just "petty". According to the current ranking of billionaires compiled by the Bloomberg agency, the value of his assets is approximately 467 billion dollars, which is approximately 9.7 trillion crowns. Musk bought the X network in 2022, when it was still operating under the name Twitter. It subsequently underwent extensive changes, which in addition to renaming included the dismissal of most employees and the loosening of content regulation rules. He restored hundreds of cancelled accounts of various disinformers and conspirators. He himself began to spread some dubious statements on the network and regularly swore that he would "stop the woke virus".
All of this gradually led to the network losing its attractiveness both in the eyes of users and advertisers. While in 2022 it earned 4.5 billion dollars from advertising, in 2023 its advertising revenues fell by almost half to 2.2 billion dollars. In the following period, they continued to decrease. According to an analysis by the WARC company, the potential for advertising revenues of the social network X at the time it was bought by a known billionaire, was much higher. It was supposed to be around 5 billion dollars.
Sources: Author's article, ČTK, Bloomberg, Mediaguru, Seznam News
