Social media platform X/Twitter was abuzz with screenshots of account detail screenshots on Sunday, after a new feature was introduced that allows users to check the country that the account was based and created in.
While virtual private networks (VPNs), travel, shared accounts, and expatriatism made results more indicative than definitive, the feature cast serious doubts, not just on the authenticity of large accounts on X but also on the discourse across social media platforms on polarizing and salient issues.
MAGA influencers, Groypers, Anti-Zionists, Zionists, Gazan influencers, Israeli IDF girls – No topic was untouched as subjects focused accounts followed by tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people were suggested to be deceptive as to their origin. Popular accounts claiming to be champions of American will were indicated to be from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, or India. Beggars identifying as Gazans desperate for funds to buy food or flee the territory were revealed to be from Nigeria or eastern Europe. Those foreign to debates and issues were using X to capitalize on or manipulate contentious debates for their benefit or for that of a third party actor.
X product head Nikita Bier said on the platform on Saturday that the new feature was an “important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square,” but Western users appeared to be shocked at just how global the forum was revealed to be.
There seemed to be a degree of naivety, knowing, in theory, that foreign actors could inject themselves into debates, but being surprised at just how extensive the infiltration was on matters dear to them. Even if an account was created or owned by an expat American, or never claimed to be from the US, a pall of suspicion has fallen on every outside party commenting on US politics. Though the scale of the deception for any given topic is unclear, many have made broad claims that all accounts of a certain theme or alignment are inauthentic, such as an activist going as far as to claim that online antisemitism was all a “foreign psyop.”
The sense of betrayal is palpable
Regardless of how extensive the phenomenon, the sense of betrayal is palpable in social media timelines. Yet it’s also similar to responses to past breaks in information trust.
AS BIER indicated, X owner Elon Musk sought to make the platform a digital town square, supposedly allowing for the replacement of legacy media, with crowdsourced and democratic citizen journalism. Musk has – justifiedly, more often than not – attacked legacy mainstream media for misleading by being selective of clips, such as of his presidential inauguration speech arm-waving gaffe. He accused mainstream media of controlling narratives in May by sharing a video of multiple outlets using the same rhetoric. The media has further been propagandistic in the stories that it decides to report, according to Musk.
“As recent events have shown all too clearly, you can’t trust the legacy (aka mainstream) news at all,” Musk said on his platform in September. “They lie relentlessly or simply ignore major stories that don’t fit their collectively decided narrative.”
The sense of betrayal regarding trusted X sources is not on the same level of ill will that mainstream outlets have fostered over the years, but it demonstrates that social media platforms have the same problems.
The video that Musk shared in May, of many outlets parroting the same wording, is a common meme format demonstrating the common control of mainstream media outlets. Yet such parroting is also rampant on social media, with bots and suspect users using the same phrases and content repeatedly to magnify ideas. In the wake of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s electoral victory, a network of accounts supposedly representing Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews shared almost identical messages of praise and denying Jewish concerns about his administration.
One of these, Torah Judaism, was indicated to be based in the Philippines rather than in New York, as claimed, before shifting to regional settings, so the account was registered as East Asia and Pacific. The region basing was shared by another in the network, Voice of Rabbis, which claims to be in the US and has almost 300,000 followers. Jewish Voice appears to be based in West Asia, and Torah Jews appear to have used a VPN to change the appearance of its location.
SOME OF the repetition on social media is plagiarism, with accounts cannibalizing the content of smaller followings with marginally successful posts. They often copy legacy media content, screenshotting and cropping to capitalize on the reporting of the legacy media that they were supposed to replace.
Cutting clips of people out of context has become as commonplace on social media – on self-professed news accounts and by independent journalists – as it ever was in mainstream media.
Triggernometry podcast co-host Konstantin Kisin, on November 11 noted the virality of misleading clips of his interviews with Daily Wire pundit Ben Shapiro and comedian Dave Smith. Both commentators had been clipped and presented with misleading captions by anonymous accounts hoping to harvest viral “rage.”
Problems of context aren’t always intentional on social media. Posts commonly leave out essential information, not adequately detailing the parties involved, the events, where these events happen, or even when. Yet they become the basis of people’s opinions on important topics.
The term “fake news” was popularized by US President Donald Trump to express contempt for the misinformation and political bias that manifested in mainstream media, but with the advent of AI-generated content, the problem of fake news has graduated to a new level.
Writing false information can sway people, but now anyone can also create convincing photographic and video evidence to generate events out of whole cloth. During the Israel-Hamas War, X turned into a veritable “A-I Jazeera” with AI-generated pictures posted by supposed Gaza journalists documenting alleged Israeli atrocities. The pedigree of these supposed Gazan sources was only the tip of the iceberg.
These issues are probably more pronounced on other social media platforms of dubious ownership or demographics more susceptible to AI-generated fakery.
In addition to the location feature, X also has community notes to fact-check. Bier said on his platform that the product team planned to “provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X.”
The outrage in response to the location-feature’s revelations demonstrates some degree of broken trust in aspects of the “town square.”
This trust was largely blind, with people swinging from one extreme to another. Those same people who ran from legacy media because of disinformation and dishonesty ran into the arms of influencers and anonymous news-slop accounts, many of which might be even more blatantly dishonest and disinformative. The result was a warped [theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s] “Gell-Mann amnesia effect” (doubting one source for good reason but not applying that reasoning to others) amplified along the greater legion of individual posts of myriads of accounts.
Media literacy and criticism have not sufficiently transferred.
With some users declaring in broad strokes that everything of a certain online ideological brand is fake, there is the same type of reflexive backlash that has occurred with mainstream media.
Media literacy and the general balance of the media landscape is more of a problem than X or any particular platform. Rather than swinging to another polar opposite, personal responsibility needs to be a recognized factor in news consumption.
The mainstream media, for better or worse, can no longer act as a gatekeeper.
Everyone is their own gatekeeper, and they may need to be taught from an early age how to scrutinize any source or report, be it from The Jerusalem Post or any of the anonymous “censored” news channels on X. A new media ecosystem is emerging in which independent media, legacy media, and crowdsourced citizen journalism all have a part to play.
X has indeed become a vital public square. It has become a spokesperson platform for law enforcement, civil organizations, businesses, and governments, where they share their official statements in a more transparent, accessible, and accountable manner than in the past, in which perhaps official missives were only accessible by journalists.
Experts have more of a platform than before. They don’t have to necessarily rely on the intermediary of the media, and can share their opinions more directly. There is less need to rely on legacy media experts who often don’t have any qualification in the field they’re writing about.
X allows for the crowdsourcing of breaking news – a person on the scene of an incident can more quickly respond and share developments. There are more citizen journalists than professional journalists, as anyone can break the news with a smartphone.
While monetization had served as a motivator for a lot of the inauthentic X activity that was exposed by the location feature, it also makes it more financially feasible to enter the field of journalism as an independent actor.
Yet X’s format also means that the individual pieces of information are often disconnected and diffuse. Often, people don’t see the entire story, just fragments. Sometimes this is because they are in a social media echo chamber and only see certain content, or just aren’t following relevant actors.
Standard media is still good at curation of individual pieces of information and their integration into a full story. Most information is not publicly presented and requires standard media practices to procure it, by investigation, interviews, and queries. Mainstream outlets provide greater scrutiny and verification of information, and can be complemented by the crowdsourced fact-checking provided by X.
Whereas legacy media fails to address stories beyond myopic ideological lenses, independent media is good at catching them. Specialist journalists in independent media can afford to provide depth in niches where legacy media cannot invest.
Legacy media also plays for broad appeal, while independent media can cater to and represent specific audiences. Much of independent media doesn’t do original reporting and is actually commentary based on legacy media content, providing critique and analysis from multiple viewpoints.
The location feature revealed a great deal about where our sources of information can be found, but there is no application feature that can instill prudence in news consumers. It is up to all consumers to find that within themselves, and not allow themselves to become victims to online manipulators. It is also the responsibility of authentic legacy, independent, and citizen journalists to evolve beyond a zero-sum game, and chart a path to a healthy information landscape, where they each have a plot on the map, and sensational fake news that takes advantage of a polarized environment does not.