Many prominent personalities in the 'Make America great again' (Maga) movement on X have been revealed to be based outside the US, including in Russia, Nigeria and India, following the rollout of a new transparency feature on the social media platform. The tool, called 'about this account', became available on Friday to users of the Elon Musk-owned platform, allowing anyone to see an account's location, join date, username change history and how the X app was downloaded.
As soon as the update was introduced, users identified numerous Maga and rightwing influencers who presented themselves as patriotic Americans but were operating from other countries. Liberal influencer Harry Sisson described it as 'easily one of the greatest days on this platform', adding that seeing 'all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats' who had been warning about this.
According to the Daily Beast, the account MAGANationX, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading 'Patriot Voice for We The People', is actually operated from eastern Europe. Another popular profile, IvankaNews, an Ivanka Trump fan account with about 1 million followers that frequently posts about illegal immigration, Islam and support for Trump, was revealed to be based in Nigeria.
Further cases were uncovered by other users: Dark Maga, a smaller account with roughly 15,000 followers, is run from Thailand; MAGA Scope, which has more than 51,000 followers, operates out of Nigeria; and MAGA Beacon is based in south Asia. Users on Reddit also joined the exposé effort, posting examples of accounts that appeared to misrepresent their origins. One Reddit user posted a screenshot of a woman who claimed to live in Texas but instead appeared to be located in Russia; as of Sunday, the user named in the post appeared to have a US location, though X had flagged the possible use of a VPN, which allows users to mask their real location.
Bots spreading misinformation and propaganda have been a long-running problem on Twitter, a problem that has been significantly exacerbated since Musk bought it in October 2022 and then renamed it X. Its AI chatbot, Grok, has also been found to frequently make and amplify false claims.
