Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.
OP has just completely pulled this analysis out of their ass. They aren’t all constantly running g cyber operations on Reddit, that bears zero resemblance to what cyber operations look like in real life including the point that you raised.
Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.
I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.
Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth.
AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions.
Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the paper right now)
I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better.
I didn't downvote, but it's naive to the point of irresponsibility not to assume and prepare for LLMs being weaponized in the exact way as social media as you alluded to. It's not like human nature or the nature of capitalism has changed recently.
For decades I have continuously studied physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, management science, market research, economics, religion, finance, and computer science among many other things. I study for 4-5 hours on average every day, and the rest of my working hours are spent practicing my craft.
The reason I say this is that blind hope and informed hope are two different things.
Media has always relied on novel fear to attract attention. It's always "dramatized"; sacrificing truth for what sells. However AI is like electricity or computation. People make it to get things done. Some of those things may be media, but it will also be applied to everything else people want to get done. The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't keep use them. And the thing about lies is that they don't work.
For all of human history people have become more informed and capable. More conveniences, more capabilities, more ideas, more access to knowledge, tools, etc.
What makes you think that AI is somehow different than all other human invention that came before it?
It's just more automation. Bad people will automate bad things, good people will automate good things.
I don't have a problem with people pointing out risks and wanting to mitigate them, but I do have a problem with invalid presuppositions that the future will be worse than the past.
So no, I don't think I'm hoping for a unicorn. I think I'm hoping that my intuition for how the universe works is close enough, and the persistent pessimism that seems to permeate from social media is wrong.
Speaking as someone who has also spent decades both studying and applying STEM and social sciences my commentary is this:
> The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't use them.
People will and do use tools that don't work. Over time fewer people use bad tools as word spreads. Often "new" bad tools have a halo uptake of popularity.
> And the thing about lies is that they don't work.
History tells us that lies work in the short term, and that is sufficient to force bad decisions that have long shadows.
Lies work in the sense that they can persuade large groups of people to take courses of action based on their beleif in those lies.
They are used by bad actors to, say, win elections and then destroy systemic safeguards and monitoring mechanisms that work to spotlight bad actions and limit damage.
There are also lies, such as a common belief in Wagyl, that draw people to together and act in unison as a community to help the less fortunate, preserve the environment and common resources, and other things not generally perceived as destructive.
The number of otherwise intelligent folks I follow on twitter who occasionally brag or make note of their follower count without realizing 80%+ are bots is way too high.
I think that's by design though. Tolerate bots to get high-value users to participate more after they think real people are actually listening to them.
I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world.
Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
Yes and no. It also shows which app store country the account is tied to, and that my friend is a little bit more work. It also shows an icon when it suspects VPN. A lot of these foreign run accounts are in fact not using VPN and their host country matches their app store country. Lots of "e-girl" type of accounts are foreign owned, and there's an insane number of racist accounts LARPing as American run from places like Turkey, and other countries. I think my favorite call out was some Canadian account that nobody realized was Canadian. I think if you're going to inject yourself in the politics of other countries your audience deserves to know if you're not even living there.
You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
Country of origin is based on IP. Many British accounts are using VPNs due to the online safety act and this is noted by X. X also shows the country of the app store the app was downloaded from which is more accurate.
Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
It’s ironic but also completely typical.
Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
Okay, I came across another video talking about Roblox and it's pedo problems, and I think that's problematic. And I might talk about that if the topic goes toward "problematic things that are currently on my mind".
And with that statement you ironically insinuate that I'm a pedo
You're not the first person that made that argument (that the people talking about a problem actually are the real perps!), but from my perspective it feels more like an easy way to make it socially unacceptable to talk about categories of issues. Which is likely intended by the person making this argument, likely because... You see were this is going?
>Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.
I'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
X shows a "LOCK" icon when they are coming in VPN. To out them.
Also, it shows which country's app store you installed your app. For this reason, when they use their mobile app, it will be outted that way.
It's not via IP address. I created my account using a US data center IP back in 2022 from Malaysia. I am now in the UK, using a Swiss VPN IP. My location shows up as Japan...
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
Google thinks my account is American for Play Store geo limiting purposes, and if I recall correctly would only let me update it by adding a payment card, which I refuse to do. I don’t know where they even got that idea—they should have known full well I was Australian. My best guess is that for a few years I used a phone I bought while visiting America. But it was neither my first phone nor my most recent, and the account was at least five years old before I even visited the US.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think people en masse have trust in any of these accounts. But when your feed is filled with the kind of stuff they say day in day out it still affects your overall perspective of the world. “No smoke without fire” on a subconscious level.
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
We know they're just optimizing for time spent on the site/app, as a proxy for the number of ads they show you and then get paid for.
But the thing that was supprising to me, as someone that remembers the world before the internet, is that anger is the thing that makes people stay on a site.
Before the internet came along, one would have thought that Truth would be the thing. Or funniness, or gossip, or even titalation and smut. Anger would have been quite far down on the list of 'addicting' things. But the proof is obvious, anger drives dollars.
There's no putting this knowledge away now that we know it.
The lesson only question is what are we going to do about it?
hacker news, Reddit and similar have always been about following subjects or topics you like, getting the latest discussion in a field of your interest. twitter was all about following people not topics, so you'd get a wider range of topics, but you tended to focus on accounts more and give more weight to specific users than you might here.
If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".
But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.
It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.
For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.
It is also the only way to get my city's public transport system to reply to queries about why a bus is extremely late, when/if it is coming. I always get a nice polite reply because it's publicly available. If I call I get stonewalled with endless call center rerouting eventually leading to a dial tone
Righting Wrongs by Kenneth Roth said something along the same lines, except in this case he said as director of human rights watch he was able to get the attention of despots and change their behavior by posting on twitter. It's clear there are some benefits. Roth's messaging would probably not be impacted by revealing his nation of origin, so it doesn't seem like have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All social media (including HN) is horrible in some ways. And they all suffer from too many people being overly credulous to random comments.
But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.
My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber.
It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
> My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
A lot of people did not have trust and have been asking for this country-of-origin feature for years. Better would be if they bring back country of initial account creation, or some way to identify VPN usage.
Probably the thing I loved about it most was the fact that I could talk directly with people that I felt had a real impact in the world
Scientists/Researchers
Journalists
Activists
Politicians
Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)
There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff
You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)
Yep, I effectively landed my favorite job by engaging with the Erlang community on Twitter. I miss it, but it just got to be too toxic during the 2016 election cycle (in fairness, everything was too toxic then, and it hasn’t gotten better since).
I think that ALL communities become toxic as they grow
I often hear that one community, or another, is "really good, not toxic at all, which is true when it starts (for tech, whilst it's "new" and everyone is still interested in figuring out how it works, sharing their learnings, and actively working to encourage people to also take interest)
Then idealism works it way in - this community is the greatest that every existed ever - and whatever it is centred is the best at whatever
Then - all other things are bad, you're <something bad> if you think otherwise
And, boom, toxicity starts to abound
For me, I've seen it so many times, whether in motorised transport (Motorcycles vs cars, then Japanese bikes vs British/European/American then individual brands (eg Triumph vs Norton), or even /style/ of bike (Oh you ride a sport bike, when clearly a cruiser is better...))
In the tech scene it's been Unix vs Microsoft, then Microsoft vs Linux or Apple, and then... well no doubt you've seen it too
It is basically two totally distinct products: the "Following" feed that you can make it as you like, and the "For You" that is just a stream of the stupidest posts imaginable by people you don't know.
I stopped using a few years ago it even so - while the Following feed is much better than the other one, the replies of anyone with even a bit of reach would still just be a sewer of bots and trolls. It was impossible to have meaningful dialogs with that. Twitter used to be better at hiding that nonsense but that changed.
The sort of people who think "girls need colorful websites and a bunch of them are friends with me on Twitter" are the same ones who think "that stripper really likes me".
It doesnt have to be US citizen only. It just has to be who they are claiming to be. If someone in india or europe wants to comment on foreign politics, thats fine. They just shouldnt be able to pretend they are from the US or anywhere else
a town square isn't just a place, it's always a polity that requires common values and a shared culture. Otherwise you at best have an airport lobby.
A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so.
Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.
> how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow.
If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion.
Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
wouldn't that happen with this too if you require people to sign up with their US passport because then now everything you type is going to have much more weight I guess facebook in a sense is already like this with all the verification required.
the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
The stats don't bear that out. Bluesky has been losing momentum since the election, with its DAU dropping from around 3.5 million to under 1.5 million today. For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. Right-wing alternative platforms had similar issues sustaining momentum, despite a much stronger push factor (right-wing people kept getting banned). It's hard to overcome the power of Twitter's network effect.
The stats show that Twitter is going down overall. People can’t handle the amount of bots and discourse over there
Threads is basically at the level of Twitter now.
Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.
When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like.
And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.
> and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user.
if a guy in india can make great MAGA posts, is that really a problem?
its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it.
id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good)
is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.
With the exception of evangelical Christian’s where there’s obviously a huge amount of overlap I’ve never seen a group so eager to be lied to and so lacking in critical thinking as MAGA folks.
If only there was some kind of PKI that could attest the identity of the person. It's a shame, that US doesn't have a government capable of running it.
every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change.
IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away.
Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.
Wechat does not reveal "user location", it only applies to "public account". It's not what you'd imagine for an "account", it's more like an "news feed" where org can publish articles.
However if you comment on those articles, your provincial location would be attached. the Cyber Admin of CCP mandates every app to reveal the provincial location for author and commenter.
It does for other social networks like Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu though, you can see the location of the user (province-level for China, country-level for anyone else) on their profile.
I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.
People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea.
If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?
Reminds me of a japanese news article about that topic where they exposed some of these accounts - these are mostly from India and other poor countries were posting fake engagement makes them a LOT more money than any other job. In this case there were some accounts that searched for Japanese earthquake news and posted condolences etc to drive up their numbers (this was after the 2023 Noto earthquake).
To add to this , twitters algo seems primed to amplify controvesial topics to boost engagements.Why some topics always seemsto keep getting boosted while others barely trend.
Which for many enterprising trolls/grifter have seen them become SEO(TEO?) experts to push their preferred narratives for clout/profit while drowning the entire timelines in a flood of noise.
While the location now shows US, X notes that the account location might not be accurate due to use of VPN
Just 'now'... not when signing up for their account?
It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.
It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.
This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.
Eh. I think this is just evidence that if you pay people to have divisive opinions (as X does) then that will incentivize divisive discourse. We’re seeing it come from developing nations because it’s worth their time economically.
> This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of.
Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.
> The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question.
This is the pattern with all Russian influence operations; they’re always implied to be ominously large and end up being laughably small.
American political polarization had nothing to do with the Russians; this is just the refrain of frustrated Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ill-conceived policy. Israel has always had far more sway over American politics.
This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election. I gave you one small example, it's on you to look for the full picture rather than jump to an erroneous conclusion based on god knows what motivations.
The problem in particular is not only the scale but that this propaganda is not solely directed at altering US policy towards Russia, it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country. If the US is fighting itself then it isn't fighting Russia after all.
> They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election.
Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing.
> it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country.
That is likely one of Russia’s goals; it is not likely that the Russians were the origin of these political cleavages. This was the problem with the entire Russian influence narrative; it was a post-hoc rationalization for why exceptionally bad ideas like diversity and multiculturalism were rejected by a subset of the population. In essence: “If they hadn’t been exposed to these Facebook posts, they never would have had these illiberal ideas put into their heads.”
It was also impossible to take seriously because most of the elected officials promoting it were receiving campaign contributions from AIPAC.
> This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election
Maybe it wasn't your intent, but your comment makes it sound like this was an issue with only a single side of the political spectrum. However...
> The Russians weaponized social media to organize political rallies, both in support of and against certain candidates, according to the indictment. Although the Russians organized some rallies in opposition to Trump's candidacy, most were supportive.
Not to mention the recent exposure of the funding source of the fine folks over at Tenet Media.
Tenet is a good example that they don't pay for specific words to be said, they pay to amplify outlets who are already saying what they want amplified.
In my personal experience a lot of the people involved in Facebook Russian influence operations are post Soviet exodus diaspora boomers. They share the content produced by the troll farms.
Interesting. The extent of Russian influence I noticed peaked in the Spring of 2016. Lots of self-professed fascists were converting to East Orthodox Christianity and subscribing to the idea that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China formed some of the last governments on earth not controlled by a Rothschild-owned central bank.
I know of a few defectors who ended up there; one was an American that went by the name of “Texas,” while another one was a Canadian who moved there to be a farmer in hopes of protecting his family from what he saw as degenerate values being propagated by the Canadian education system. Texas was supposedly murdered by Russian soldiers while operating with Kremlin-aligned militias in the Donbas region. The Canadian is still living in Russia and has a YouTube channel.
I suspected a regular rotation of Kremlin agents were on /pol/ during the Syrian Civil War. Russian sentiment was generally far more positive prior to the invasion. It’s possible this was all organic and just collapsed as people saw what they did to Ukraine; I really have no idea.
Frog Twitter for their part pivoted on Russia quite quickly in the early 2020s, around the time Thiel was buying out podcasts.
Moving to Russia is an extreme outlier. These people exist but there's only a dozen or so. Numbers are not much different than the late Soviet era. In the 1920s thousands of Americans moved to Russia to build communism. Many also came back disillusioned, or died in a gulag.
On the other hand there's hundreds of thousands of diaspora Russians, and they're very pro russian. Richard Spencer's ex wife is a good example of this. Overall this is a much bigger impact than the dozen converts or a few thousand half hearted Harper's.
Obviously before the war Russia was less publicly objectionable. In Syria everyone just hated ISIS.
The /pol/ effect is nostalgia for worlds that no longer exist and we're not personally experienced. It's political flavored nostalgia instead of Pokémon collecting.
In terms of American twitter Russiagate and making Russia a red/blue partisan issue has been the most disastrous. It's simple contrarianism.
It would be silly if the Russians weren't stirring shit up in the enemy camp.
That's what the Russians do. It's too difficult to improve their own country, their own lives, and their own prospects, so they focus on the next-best strategy for the acquisition of power, which is dragging everybody else down to their level.
It wouldn't be difficult to improve Russia. Just the kelptocracy makes it impossible. "Why go to the moon when we have craters (potholes) here in samara" -some kid on tiktok.
> What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?
They’re grifters; their interest in American politics is commercial. Indians were targeting Trump supporters with fake news for ad revenue as early as 2015; this is a continuation of that model.
There were a number of accounts that got doxxed in the last year that were demonstrated to have Indian owners. Engagement farms have been doing this since Trump’s first term; the goal is primarily ad revenue, not political influence. I didn’t see any that were Israeli but everyone knew those accounts were there.
It’s possible the Russians have contracted influence campaigns out to Indian and Israeli firms, but the simpler explanation is just that India is continuing its long and storied history of using telecomm networks to scam unwitting boomers while Israel is continuing its long and storied history of being the worst greatest ally of all time.
Interesting read. Thank you for sharing. Was there ever any evidence that they hit their projected metrics? A million followers after a year seems ambitious.
And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance.
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )
First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.
After this change, accounts created in US will be sought after. Operate them through a US VPN. Voracious appetite for consuming content will be filled by outsiders. US effs up the world with violence, now world is riling up Americans with similarly worded content of their own politicians.
Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other).
Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.
I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.
Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country
Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
> is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign
Speculation: they're resolving historical IP addresses against a current IP geolocation database. An IP which belonged to a US company in 2010 may have since been sold to a Nigerian ISP, but that doesn't mean that the user behind that IP in 2010 was actually in Nigeria.
I was going to speculate the same thing. Seems pretty likely... a lot of systems record information about when an account was created, and IP location correlations are period sensitive (at least some of them are... my college is most likely still using its /16 and hasn't moved outside the city where it was founded)
I doubt for the most part it's people being hired. I think mostly it's probably people in low income countries who make a living posting as different identity on social media.
Advertising revenue directly from X, posting affiliate links to products or gambling/crypto sites, and directly asking followers for money. Or they're being paid by clandestine operations such as Internet Research Agency.
These aren't like a single real person pretending to be Americans because of their deep interst in American politics.
These are paid astroturfers probably more like call centers, paid for presumably by all sorts of interests from foreign intelligence services, to businesses (or select executives), to internal political groups or politicians trying to manipulate public opinion.
Both political extremes are suffering from this kind of manipulation where real concerns are twisted and amplified for lets say the more gullible half of the population (gullibility knows know political alignment exclusively). The excluded middle is afraid of the people who have been manipulated this way (death threats also know no political boundaries).
To a billionaire, hiring a few hundred Nigerians to upvote and share their propaganda is so cheap that it’s like you buying a cup of coffee.
They use professional paid services from these low labour cost countries all the time for publicity or to control the narrative.
By some estimates 20-60% of everything you see on social media is generated by a bot farm, depending on the forum in question. An analysis of Reddit showed some subreddits are 80% AI generated.
It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amounts of) money. It's not even unique, there are similar grinds about sports, religion, cute animals, subculture jokes, etc.
The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.
Are you trying to make sure that any criticism of X can be shrugged off by supporters and detractors alike as cheap ideological attacks? Because if you are, excellent job.
You don’t think girls use the internet? I’ve met some in real life, know a bunch who clearly aren’t fake. That’s why they hang out on twitter. Places like HackerNews are cool for guys, but not fun. Twitter may be chaotic, but it’s fun for girls and many feel comfortable there. They can post stuff, kind of like pinterest.
Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
> host of a lot of military cyber operations
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
Did they edit it? I stepped forward a few years and it's still there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit...
Funny nonetheless though.
The boring but more likely explanation is that "most addicted" is just a weird statistic that produced weird results.
Eglin has something like 50,000 people but it's actual population as a census designated area is more like 5000.
Oak Brook, IL was also "most addicted" but people didn't run with the idea that McDonalds HQ was running psyops.
I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.
There's a Popeye's at Eglin, maybe all that traffic was a chicken sandwich influence campaign?
Urm. They almost certainly are though?
It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383
> military cyber operations
You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.
OP has just completely pulled this analysis out of their ass. They aren’t all constantly running g cyber operations on Reddit, that bears zero resemblance to what cyber operations look like in real life including the point that you raised.
Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you?
Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)
I'm not author of parent.
My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.
I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
> intelligent and knowledgeable. people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
I also see this with AI answers relying on crap internet content.
Most content on the internet has been optimized to get attention, not to represent truth.
AI trained on most content will be filled with misconceptions and contradictions.
Recent research has been showing that culling bad training data has a huge positive impact on model outputs. Something like 90% of desirable outputs comes from 10% of the training data (forget the specifics and don't have time to track down the paper right now)
I really hope that AI business models don't fall into relying on getting and keeping attention. I also hope the creators of them exist in a win-win relationship with society as a whole. If AIs compete with each other based on which best represent truth, then overall things could get a lot better.
The alternative seems dreadful.
Edit: I am curious why this is getting downvoted.
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
It was discussed a month or so back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
Yeah I saw that one too, which I would think supports my point that distilling down training data would lead to more truth aligned AI.
I mean it's also just the classic garbage in garbage out heuristic, right?
The more training data is filtered and refined, the closer the model will get to approximating truth (at least functional truths)
It seems we are agreeing and adding to each other's points... Were you one of the people who downvoted my comment?
I'm just curious what I'm missing.
I didn't downvote, but it's naive to the point of irresponsibility not to assume and prepare for LLMs being weaponized in the exact way as social media as you alluded to. It's not like human nature or the nature of capitalism has changed recently.
Are you saying that hope is naive and irresponsible?
Hoping that the tech giants will put truth over profit is folly. Hoping that audiences will reject this is viable.
> Hoping that the tech giants will put truth over profit is folly.
I never said that though?
> Hoping that audiences will reject this is viable.
I have no clue what you mean. What is "this" refering to?
What you are hoping for will not occur.
Do hope. But hoping for a unicorn is magic thinking.
For other people, they can either count this as a reason to despair, or figure out a way to get to the next best option.
The world sucks, so what ? In the end all problems get solved if you can figure them out.
For decades I have continuously studied physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, management science, market research, economics, religion, finance, and computer science among many other things. I study for 4-5 hours on average every day, and the rest of my working hours are spent practicing my craft.
The reason I say this is that blind hope and informed hope are two different things.
Media has always relied on novel fear to attract attention. It's always "dramatized"; sacrificing truth for what sells. However AI is like electricity or computation. People make it to get things done. Some of those things may be media, but it will also be applied to everything else people want to get done. The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't keep use them. And the thing about lies is that they don't work.
For all of human history people have become more informed and capable. More conveniences, more capabilities, more ideas, more access to knowledge, tools, etc.
What makes you think that AI is somehow different than all other human invention that came before it?
It's just more automation. Bad people will automate bad things, good people will automate good things.
I don't have a problem with people pointing out risks and wanting to mitigate them, but I do have a problem with invalid presuppositions that the future will be worse than the past.
So no, I don't think I'm hoping for a unicorn. I think I'm hoping that my intuition for how the universe works is close enough, and the persistent pessimism that seems to permeate from social media is wrong.
Speaking as someone who has also spent decades both studying and applying STEM and social sciences my commentary is this:
> The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't use them.
People will and do use tools that don't work. Over time fewer people use bad tools as word spreads. Often "new" bad tools have a halo uptake of popularity.
> And the thing about lies is that they don't work.
History tells us that lies work in the short term, and that is sufficient to force bad decisions that have long shadows.
> The thing about tools is that if they don't work people won't use them.
My bad. I meant won't keep using them.
> History tells us that lies work in the short term, and that is sufficient to force bad decisions that have long shadows.
What do you mean by "work"?
It sounds like you are implying that a lie "works" by convincing people to believe it?
I meant a lie doesn't work in that if you follow the lie you will make incorrect predictions about the future.
If someone acts on a lie which results in a bad decision with a "long shadow" then wouldn't that mean acting out the lie didn't work?
Lies work in the sense that they can persuade large groups of people to take courses of action based on their beleif in those lies.
They are used by bad actors to, say, win elections and then destroy systemic safeguards and monitoring mechanisms that work to spotlight bad actions and limit damage.
There are also lies, such as a common belief in Wagyl, that draw people to together and act in unison as a community to help the less fortunate, preserve the environment and common resources, and other things not generally perceived as destructive.
The number of otherwise intelligent folks I follow on twitter who occasionally brag or make note of their follower count without realizing 80%+ are bots is way too high.
I think that's by design though. Tolerate bots to get high-value users to participate more after they think real people are actually listening to them.
I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world.
Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.
Really Twitter may be one of the worse ones, but the internet really has become CGP Grey's this video will make you angry.
"It's all fake?" "Always has been"
I'll try with a Simpsons analogy:
> Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall.
Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose
> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
Yes and no. It also shows which app store country the account is tied to, and that my friend is a little bit more work. It also shows an icon when it suspects VPN. A lot of these foreign run accounts are in fact not using VPN and their host country matches their app store country. Lots of "e-girl" type of accounts are foreign owned, and there's an insane number of racist accounts LARPing as American run from places like Turkey, and other countries. I think my favorite call out was some Canadian account that nobody realized was Canadian. I think if you're going to inject yourself in the politics of other countries your audience deserves to know if you're not even living there.
You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
Country of origin is based on IP. Many British accounts are using VPNs due to the online safety act and this is noted by X. X also shows the country of the app store the app was downloaded from which is more accurate.
Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
It’s ironic but also completely typical.
Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
Okay, I came across another video talking about Roblox and it's pedo problems, and I think that's problematic. And I might talk about that if the topic goes toward "problematic things that are currently on my mind".
And with that statement you ironically insinuate that I'm a pedo
You're not the first person that made that argument (that the people talking about a problem actually are the real perps!), but from my perspective it feels more like an easy way to make it socially unacceptable to talk about categories of issues. Which is likely intended by the person making this argument, likely because... You see were this is going?
>Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.
Sounds like how Congress exempts themselves from many of the laws they pass.
I'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
X shows a "LOCK" icon when they are coming in VPN. To out them. Also, it shows which country's app store you installed your app. For this reason, when they use their mobile app, it will be outted that way.
It's not via IP address. I created my account using a US data center IP back in 2022 from Malaysia. I am now in the UK, using a Swiss VPN IP. My location shows up as Japan...
Are Azure VMs different to a VPN? Sorry I'm not the most technical.
Reason I ask is because there are few people I follow that use VPNs but their location is accurate on X.
Also, X also shows where you downloaded the app from, e.g. [Country] App Store, so that one might be a bit more difficult to get around.
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
You can but a lot of people use their phone and the official apps. It also shows if you primarily use a browser. :)
I would suspect they are deducing country of origin via ad targeting, which is far more precise than just geolocating IP addresses.
App Store country of origin too weighs in.
Google thinks my account is American for Play Store geo limiting purposes, and if I recall correctly would only let me update it by adding a payment card, which I refuse to do. I don’t know where they even got that idea—they should have known full well I was Australian. My best guess is that for a few years I used a phone I bought while visiting America. But it was neither my first phone nor my most recent, and the account was at least five years old before I even visited the US.
Residential VPNs are already so cheap.
Exactly how anyone still scraping Twitter does it. Dirt cheap. Same with accounts to use to get around api limits.
Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.
Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
You also need a phone number tied to your twitter account.
No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.
No, it's live.
I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think people en masse have trust in any of these accounts. But when your feed is filled with the kind of stuff they say day in day out it still affects your overall perspective of the world. “No smoke without fire” on a subconscious level.
One of the many reasons why I try and bombard myself with different views and perspectives. Foreign vs domestic. Left vs right. Personal vs official.
I don't do this with every topic unless I'm interested in discussing something just so I'm more informed just to reduce bias.
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
We know they're just optimizing for time spent on the site/app, as a proxy for the number of ads they show you and then get paid for.
But the thing that was supprising to me, as someone that remembers the world before the internet, is that anger is the thing that makes people stay on a site.
Before the internet came along, one would have thought that Truth would be the thing. Or funniness, or gossip, or even titalation and smut. Anger would have been quite far down on the list of 'addicting' things. But the proof is obvious, anger drives dollars.
There's no putting this knowledge away now that we know it.
The lesson only question is what are we going to do about it?
The internet has created low intentionality people.
hacker news, Reddit and similar have always been about following subjects or topics you like, getting the latest discussion in a field of your interest. twitter was all about following people not topics, so you'd get a wider range of topics, but you tended to focus on accounts more and give more weight to specific users than you might here.
If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".
But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.
It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.
For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.
It is also the only way to get my city's public transport system to reply to queries about why a bus is extremely late, when/if it is coming. I always get a nice polite reply because it's publicly available. If I call I get stonewalled with endless call center rerouting eventually leading to a dial tone
Righting Wrongs by Kenneth Roth said something along the same lines, except in this case he said as director of human rights watch he was able to get the attention of despots and change their behavior by posting on twitter. It's clear there are some benefits. Roth's messaging would probably not be impacted by revealing his nation of origin, so it doesn't seem like have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That hasn’t been true now for sometime. That crowd is all on Bluesky now.
Many of those people have moved to Bluesky. Which has its own issues.
A lot of those people have left.
All social media (including HN) is horrible in some ways. And they all suffer from too many people being overly credulous to random comments.
But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.
My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber.
It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
> My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
I think that almost every platform has gone through a period where the latest breaking news was being published.. as it happened
IRC
Usenet
Reddit
Facebook (live)
Twitter
IRC is fine.
A lot of people did not have trust and have been asking for this country-of-origin feature for years. Better would be if they bring back country of initial account creation, or some way to identify VPN usage.
Probably the thing I loved about it most was the fact that I could talk directly with people that I felt had a real impact in the world
Scientists/Researchers
Journalists
Activists
Politicians
Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)
There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff
You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)
Yep, I effectively landed my favorite job by engaging with the Erlang community on Twitter. I miss it, but it just got to be too toxic during the 2016 election cycle (in fairness, everything was too toxic then, and it hasn’t gotten better since).
I think that ALL communities become toxic as they grow
I often hear that one community, or another, is "really good, not toxic at all, which is true when it starts (for tech, whilst it's "new" and everyone is still interested in figuring out how it works, sharing their learnings, and actively working to encourage people to also take interest)
Then idealism works it way in - this community is the greatest that every existed ever - and whatever it is centred is the best at whatever
Then - all other things are bad, you're <something bad> if you think otherwise
And, boom, toxicity starts to abound
For me, I've seen it so many times, whether in motorised transport (Motorcycles vs cars, then Japanese bikes vs British/European/American then individual brands (eg Triumph vs Norton), or even /style/ of bike (Oh you ride a sport bike, when clearly a cruiser is better...))
In the tech scene it's been Unix vs Microsoft, then Microsoft vs Linux or Apple, and then... well no doubt you've seen it too
It is basically two totally distinct products: the "Following" feed that you can make it as you like, and the "For You" that is just a stream of the stupidest posts imaginable by people you don't know.
I stopped using a few years ago it even so - while the Following feed is much better than the other one, the replies of anyone with even a bit of reach would still just be a sewer of bots and trolls. It was impossible to have meaningful dialogs with that. Twitter used to be better at hiding that nonsense but that changed.
It’s an online bar to meet girls and flex your creativity.
If you believe those girls fawning over your creativity are real, then I've got a link for hot single milfs in your area wanting to talk to you.
[flagged]
The sort of people who think "girls need colorful websites and a bunch of them are friends with me on Twitter" are the same ones who think "that stripper really likes me".
[flagged]
Do you realise how patronising it is to say that girls like Instagram because it has better colours? I'm kind of shocked to see this take on HN.
It's probably an anecdote.
this is blatantly biased -- most idiots here are not girls at all ! /s
X obviously isn't the only platform where this is taking place and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
It doesnt have to be US citizen only. It just has to be who they are claiming to be. If someone in india or europe wants to comment on foreign politics, thats fine. They just shouldnt be able to pretend they are from the US or anywhere else
a town square isn't just a place, it's always a polity that requires common values and a shared culture. Otherwise you at best have an airport lobby.
A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so.
Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.
> how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow.
If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion.
Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
wouldn't that happen with this too if you require people to sign up with their US passport because then now everything you type is going to have much more weight I guess facebook in a sense is already like this with all the verification required.
the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling
The propaganda apparatus will adapt if that becomes common so its not a permanent solution but it's nice for now.
Yar.
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
> I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged…
One side has largely left X.
The stats don't bear that out. Bluesky has been losing momentum since the election, with its DAU dropping from around 3.5 million to under 1.5 million today. For comparison Twitter has over 100 million. Right-wing alternative platforms had similar issues sustaining momentum, despite a much stronger push factor (right-wing people kept getting banned). It's hard to overcome the power of Twitter's network effect.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
> For comparison Twitter has over 100 million.
We're on a thread about widespread fake/inauthentic users on Twitter right now. I see very little reason to trust those numbers.
Is it any more trustworthy than you saying above that "one side has largely left X"?
The stats show that Twitter is going down overall. People can’t handle the amount of bots and discourse over there Threads is basically at the level of Twitter now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/03/threads-...
>I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon
Hmm, interesting insight, what did they each say when you talked to them?
Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
Feature is online for me now. Maybe A/B test, or incomplete rollout?
It's less about political leanings and more about profits. There's a reason Jack Dorsey didn't do this, or FB or Reddit.
And why IRC went from default showing IP information to cloaking
I think that's mostly to do with script kiddies trying to DoS anyone they disagreed with.
It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
Sounds like this will stay useful for like a few days at best until these accounts work out what VPN to use to spoof the location properly.
I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.
When you have that much money, it’s actually hard to find someone who will tell you something you don’t want to hear that is actually true and isn’t doing it just to ragebait you or the like.
And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.
[dead]
> and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user.
Is it possible they enabled it back again?
All I want to know, is whether I am talking to an actual person. And I also want that person to have a single account, not multiple ones
if a guy in india can make great MAGA posts, is that really a problem?
its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it.
id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good)
is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.
With the exception of evangelical Christian’s where there’s obviously a huge amount of overlap I’ve never seen a group so eager to be lied to and so lacking in critical thinking as MAGA folks.
If only there was some kind of PKI that could attest the identity of the person. It's a shame, that US doesn't have a government capable of running it.
every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
Niche subjects are much nicer because there's often no incentive to manipulate.
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change. IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away. Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.
This reminds me of WeChat doing similar things a few years ago: Tencent's WeChat to reveal user locations on public account posts.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-us...
Wechat does not reveal "user location", it only applies to "public account". It's not what you'd imagine for an "account", it's more like an "news feed" where org can publish articles.
However if you comment on those articles, your provincial location would be attached. the Cyber Admin of CCP mandates every app to reveal the provincial location for author and commenter.
It does for other social networks like Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu though, you can see the location of the user (province-level for China, country-level for anyone else) on their profile.
I half think the place this ends up is that they make opting out of this part of the ‘verified’ account feature set. Not much point paying for a fake blue check if you can’t use it to get engagement.
People will read all kinds of political implications into this but IMO it reflects something simpler and perhaps more damning for X: that paying users for the engagement their posts make is a fundamentally bad idea.
If you’re looking to make some money on X you want engagement. If you want engagement you want to say controversial things people will argue about. What better than right wing US politics, especially when the X algorithm seems to amplify it?
Reminds me of a japanese news article about that topic where they exposed some of these accounts - these are mostly from India and other poor countries were posting fake engagement makes them a LOT more money than any other job. In this case there were some accounts that searched for Japanese earthquake news and posted condolences etc to drive up their numbers (this was after the 2023 Noto earthquake).
[dead]
yeah, id reasonably describe the results as a list of locations where the couple bucks that twitter will pay is enough to get by.
for canada though, id like to see the CBC dedicatedly paying canadians to post canadian perspectives on social media
To add to this , twitters algo seems primed to amplify controvesial topics to boost engagements.Why some topics always seemsto keep getting boosted while others barely trend.
Which for many enterprising trolls/grifter have seen them become SEO(TEO?) experts to push their preferred narratives for clout/profit while drowning the entire timelines in a flood of noise.
It's cheap and easy to use social media to propagandize, so certainly there are scores of fake American accounts, but it's irritating that this article doesn't address VPN-usage during account creation.
Google always thinks I am in Finland, because one of my coworkers on the same VPN is in Finland. Bonkers. Finish ads suck
Their humiliation ritual is just beginning.
[dead]
It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.
This is happening all over US social media, even here. If you ever wonder why US hatred has permeated modern culture, this is why.
I'm amused this is a new reveal for some people. Seemed the very likely case for me.
This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.
Most of the problem here is not gray zone warfare but just modern wow gold farmers engagement baiting for a $5 payout.
Eh. I think this is just evidence that if you pay people to have divisive opinions (as X does) then that will incentivize divisive discourse. We’re seeing it come from developing nations because it’s worth their time economically.
> This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of.
Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.
Russia hires people in Africa:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
> The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question.
This is the pattern with all Russian influence operations; they’re always implied to be ominously large and end up being laughably small.
American political polarization had nothing to do with the Russians; this is just the refrain of frustrated Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the consequences of ill-conceived policy. Israel has always had far more sway over American politics.
This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election. I gave you one small example, it's on you to look for the full picture rather than jump to an erroneous conclusion based on god knows what motivations.
The problem in particular is not only the scale but that this propaganda is not solely directed at altering US policy towards Russia, it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country. If the US is fighting itself then it isn't fighting Russia after all.
> They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election.
Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing.
> it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country.
That is likely one of Russia’s goals; it is not likely that the Russians were the origin of these political cleavages. This was the problem with the entire Russian influence narrative; it was a post-hoc rationalization for why exceptionally bad ideas like diversity and multiculturalism were rejected by a subset of the population. In essence: “If they hadn’t been exposed to these Facebook posts, they never would have had these illiberal ideas put into their heads.”
It was also impossible to take seriously because most of the elected officials promoting it were receiving campaign contributions from AIPAC.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
Agitprop cannot create divisions whole cloth, they can only amplify and inflame extant divisions.
> This sounds like being wilfully uninformed. Russia organized almost a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore. They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election
Maybe it wasn't your intent, but your comment makes it sound like this was an issue with only a single side of the political spectrum. However...
https://www.businessinsider.com/russians-organized-pro-anti-...
> The Russians weaponized social media to organize political rallies, both in support of and against certain candidates, according to the indictment. Although the Russians organized some rallies in opposition to Trump's candidacy, most were supportive.
Not to mention the recent exposure of the funding source of the fine folks over at Tenet Media.
Tenet is a good example that they don't pay for specific words to be said, they pay to amplify outlets who are already saying what they want amplified.
In my personal experience a lot of the people involved in Facebook Russian influence operations are post Soviet exodus diaspora boomers. They share the content produced by the troll farms.
Interesting. The extent of Russian influence I noticed peaked in the Spring of 2016. Lots of self-professed fascists were converting to East Orthodox Christianity and subscribing to the idea that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China formed some of the last governments on earth not controlled by a Rothschild-owned central bank.
I know of a few defectors who ended up there; one was an American that went by the name of “Texas,” while another one was a Canadian who moved there to be a farmer in hopes of protecting his family from what he saw as degenerate values being propagated by the Canadian education system. Texas was supposedly murdered by Russian soldiers while operating with Kremlin-aligned militias in the Donbas region. The Canadian is still living in Russia and has a YouTube channel.
I suspected a regular rotation of Kremlin agents were on /pol/ during the Syrian Civil War. Russian sentiment was generally far more positive prior to the invasion. It’s possible this was all organic and just collapsed as people saw what they did to Ukraine; I really have no idea.
Frog Twitter for their part pivoted on Russia quite quickly in the early 2020s, around the time Thiel was buying out podcasts.
Moving to Russia is an extreme outlier. These people exist but there's only a dozen or so. Numbers are not much different than the late Soviet era. In the 1920s thousands of Americans moved to Russia to build communism. Many also came back disillusioned, or died in a gulag.
On the other hand there's hundreds of thousands of diaspora Russians, and they're very pro russian. Richard Spencer's ex wife is a good example of this. Overall this is a much bigger impact than the dozen converts or a few thousand half hearted Harper's.
Obviously before the war Russia was less publicly objectionable. In Syria everyone just hated ISIS.
The /pol/ effect is nostalgia for worlds that no longer exist and we're not personally experienced. It's political flavored nostalgia instead of Pokémon collecting.
In terms of American twitter Russiagate and making Russia a red/blue partisan issue has been the most disastrous. It's simple contrarianism.
It would be silly if the Russians weren't stirring shit up in the enemy camp.
That's what the Russians do. It's too difficult to improve their own country, their own lives, and their own prospects, so they focus on the next-best strategy for the acquisition of power, which is dragging everybody else down to their level.
It wouldn't be difficult to improve Russia. Just the kelptocracy makes it impossible. "Why go to the moon when we have craters (potholes) here in samara" -some kid on tiktok.
You think IP addresses can't be spoofed rather easily?
What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?
> What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?
They’re grifters; their interest in American politics is commercial. Indians were targeting Trump supporters with fake news for ad revenue as early as 2015; this is a continuation of that model.
It was so successful that they took over the FBI.
You're literally posting in the comments of an article that's about the ease of hiding geographical origin.
There were a number of accounts that got doxxed in the last year that were demonstrated to have Indian owners. Engagement farms have been doing this since Trump’s first term; the goal is primarily ad revenue, not political influence. I didn’t see any that were Israeli but everyone knew those accounts were there.
It’s possible the Russians have contracted influence campaigns out to Indian and Israeli firms, but the simpler explanation is just that India is continuing its long and storied history of using telecomm networks to scam unwitting boomers while Israel is continuing its long and storied history of being the worst greatest ally of all time.
Indeed. Can I interest you in the good old USA project? https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d...
See exhibit 8 and such: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl
Or 10 which specifically talks about Twitter https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366191/dl
Interesting read. Thank you for sharing. Was there ever any evidence that they hit their projected metrics? A million followers after a year seems ambitious.
And so the user response is just organic local political provocateurs crowing over examples of their "opponents" on social media being foreign plants, while ignoring all the times their "side" were baited by fake enemies and boosted by fake allies, and then it's back to business as usual. Same game different players - if even that; the success of these accounts already relied on some combination of credulity and wilful ignorance.
Yay politics. Hooray for the engagement-driven internet.
if proof of identity was required (IAL2) to use social media most political issues in america would be solved (and some social media companies would go bankrupt in a few months :) )
Related:
X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417
Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211
First, allow anyone to sign up for the blue check mark for $8. Verified accounts loses its value and Twitter gets flooded with fake accounts and foreign run accounts. Now, try to fix it with by showing users country of origin. Now, these users will try to figure out ways to bypass it.
After this change, accounts created in US will be sought after. Operate them through a US VPN. Voracious appetite for consuming content will be filled by outsiders. US effs up the world with violence, now world is riling up Americans with similarly worded content of their own politicians.
HN also needs this feature
Anyone who follows the space closely has known about this for at least the last year. It was quite common for these accounts to make slip-ups that revealed their country of origin and to subsequently be doxxed by ideological enemies or rival influencers (they all want to be the leader and they all absolutely hate each other).
Almost all of these accounts are operating out of India or Israel. The Indians are usually in it for the money (though there’s probably some Israeli outsourcing going on there, too), whereas the Israelis were riding off 2010s Islamophobia to prime American Evangelicals for their activities in Gaza.
Indians pretend to be Israelis because they don't like Muslims who they see as similar to Pakistanis.
Where are all these Israeli accounts? That just seems to be your weird personal bias. Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now!
> Weird, because you can just confirm it for yourself now!
That is exactly what is happening and what is being reported on. The thing you attribute to "weird personal bias" is being widely exposed.
We should probably examine your weird personal bias. Weird, because you could just read the article!
> Where are all these Israeli accounts?
The Department of Homeland Security, for one.
Edit: Link removed as I was disinformed by a /pol/ PsyOp.
That is a doctored image according to both DHS and X's head of product. What kind of information bubble are you in?
Looks like you’re right:
https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743
[dead]
America outsourcing its rage is peak USA. McKinsey would be proud
It's not the USA outsourcing rage, it is foreign actors paying to manufacture rage in the USA.
While a handful troll factories are paid to destabilize USA, vast majority operate from 3rd world countries with only profit in mind.
I didn’t say WHY they are manufacturing rage. Some do it for political reasons, some for profit, some for both.
whynotboth.gif
I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.
Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
That is still foreign actors manufacturing rage, whether it is for profit or for political motivations.
I think it's more like outsiders stoking US rage on both sides. That's a bit different than "outsourcing".
Yeah, rage isn't something the US needs. It's something the US's enemies need us to have.
Even their political commentary is an entertainment export.
Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country
Because they're all from other countries. It's really not that deep
Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
Why would people stop using sites that continually provide them a daily dose of righteous anger, making their dreary lives a bit more meaningful?
This video will make you angry is 10 years old now.
https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
Anger works wonders online.
> is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign
Speculation: they're resolving historical IP addresses against a current IP geolocation database. An IP which belonged to a US company in 2010 may have since been sold to a Nigerian ISP, but that doesn't mean that the user behind that IP in 2010 was actually in Nigeria.
I was going to speculate the same thing. Seems pretty likely... a lot of systems record information about when an account was created, and IP location correlations are period sensitive (at least some of them are... my college is most likely still using its /16 and hasn't moved outside the city where it was founded)
I doubt for the most part it's people being hired. I think mostly it's probably people in low income countries who make a living posting as different identity on social media.
How are they making a living posting political propaganda of they aren’t hired?
Advertising revenue directly from X, posting affiliate links to products or gambling/crypto sites, and directly asking followers for money. Or they're being paid by clandestine operations such as Internet Research Agency.
X has revenue share for popular posts.
VPN?
These aren't like a single real person pretending to be Americans because of their deep interst in American politics.
These are paid astroturfers probably more like call centers, paid for presumably by all sorts of interests from foreign intelligence services, to businesses (or select executives), to internal political groups or politicians trying to manipulate public opinion.
Both political extremes are suffering from this kind of manipulation where real concerns are twisted and amplified for lets say the more gullible half of the population (gullibility knows know political alignment exclusively). The excluded middle is afraid of the people who have been manipulated this way (death threats also know no political boundaries).
> is there any technical reason why
with the development capability remaining at twitter anything is possible.
To a billionaire, hiring a few hundred Nigerians to upvote and share their propaganda is so cheap that it’s like you buying a cup of coffee.
They use professional paid services from these low labour cost countries all the time for publicity or to control the narrative.
By some estimates 20-60% of everything you see on social media is generated by a bot farm, depending on the forum in question. An analysis of Reddit showed some subreddits are 80% AI generated.
It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amounts of) money. It's not even unique, there are similar grinds about sports, religion, cute animals, subculture jokes, etc.
The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.
Maybe most of these accounts are managed by a offshore'd social media company?
yup, for sure that is it :)
[dead]
[flagged]
It truly is the sewer of the internet.
You think this is unique to X? If anything, it’s unique they’re exposing this.
"exposing" should have been past tense. They've quickly reverted that feature once they realized how bad it made them look.
Are you trying to make sure that any criticism of X can be shrugged off by supporters and detractors alike as cheap ideological attacks? Because if you are, excellent job.
[flagged]
Sorry to break it to you bud, but girls on the internet aren't usually girls in real life.
You don’t think girls use the internet? I’ve met some in real life, know a bunch who clearly aren’t fake. That’s why they hang out on twitter. Places like HackerNews are cool for guys, but not fun. Twitter may be chaotic, but it’s fun for girls and many feel comfortable there. They can post stuff, kind of like pinterest.