A new X update reveals that some very popular right-wing X accounts are based in foreign countries, including Nigeria, Russia, and Chile.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we recap how a new update on the social media platform X outed several popular accounts as foreign actors, and we cover more media misses.
Foreign Actors Influence the Right-Wing Conversation on X
Several pro-MAGA social media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers on X were recently revealed to be based outside the U.S., in countries including Nigeria, Russia, and Chile, after X unveiled a new update to the platform.
In an effort to increase transparency and combat so-called troll farms taking over the political conversation in the U.S., Elon Musk’s X rolled out a new “About This Account” feature on Friday, allowing users to see where a given user is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the app.
X users quickly used the update to find out more information about their online adversaries, several of whom have built followings in the hundreds of thousands by stoking political divisions on the American right despite the fact they they live elsewhere. Some of them are likely doing so at the behest of a paying client looking to push the online conversation one way or the other, and some are probably just poorly adjusted people who have decided for whatever reason to obsess over political differences in the U.S.
MAGANationX, which has nearly 400,000 followers and claims to be a “Patriot Voice for We The People,” is based in Eastern Europe, according to the platform’s new update. IvankaNews, a fan account dedicated to tracking news and updates about Ivanka Trump that has 1 million followers, has been posting from Nigeria, despite making frequent posts about supporting President Trump and warning against the threats of illegal immigration to the U.S. The account AmericanVoice_ had more than 200,000 followers before the update revealed that the account was being run from South Asia. The owners then deleted the account.
Femalebodybuil6 garnered 390,000 followers by claiming to be an “Immigrant in the USA” and a “Trump Lover,” but was revealed to be operating from Morocco.
Other popular accounts were based in Nigeria, Macedonia, and Pakistan.
The new update offers further evidence that the online political conversation — which has created the perception that the American right is riven by divisions on issues ranging from Israel to women’s rights — is in part being manufactured by online actors with no real stake in America’s future.
Musk, in his time as the owner of Twitter-turned-X has vowed to address the issue of bots on the platform, many of which attempt to sway conversations around American politics online. (A study one year after Musk’s takeover revealed bot activity on the platform had reached an all-time high.)
Wilfred Reilly first warned back in July, here at NRO, that online alt-right accounts aren’t always what they seem:
Most notably, pro-America conservatives should be careful not only when consuming left-leaning media; they should also take a great deal of “dissident” content with a few caviar spoons of salt. The foreign origins of a great deal of alt-right and “red-pill” content, paid or not, may well explain some of the . . . odd trends that we have all been witnessing online of late.
For instance, while about 75 percent of Republicans are generally quite pro-Israel, Twitter/X and Facebook are full of content like Jake Shields’s viral “Never forget what Israel did” post — a caption he used for a video of the destruction of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on 9/11. Similarly, whereas by 1920 the U.S. had recognized the coast-to-coast right of women to vote, today we see dozens of popular online petitions arguing for a “repeal of the 19th Amendment.” There is an Occam’s razor explanation for this: The people posting this sort of junk, whatever their profile pictures might look like — remember the “Scots” from Iran — are not your average citizens of the United States.
Reilly was driven to write on the topic after Israeli strikes led to a brief internet outage in Iran and dozens of Twitter and Facebook accounts that back the independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom suspiciously went quiet, despite typically being active on an hourly basis. Internet users concluded that the accounts were being stage-managed by or from Iran.
And he cites several other examples, including the case of Red Pill Media, which was outed by pro-Israel activist Eyal Yakoby as being managed from Pakistan, despite the account’s having previously claimed “I am an American citizen . . . born and raised in America . . . I refuse to die for Israel.”
Others include Ian Miles Cheong, who turns up at the center of many American right-wing conversations online despite his having lived his entire life in Malaysia, a fact he does not hide. There’s also Radio Genoa, a “pro-white” European nationalist, who is likely Cambodian.
But as for the X update allowing users to see an account’s location, the platform acknowledges it’s not 100 percent accurate.
The owner behind 1776General_ has over 140,000 followers and claims to be a “constitutionalist, patriot and ethnically American,” despite the app’s location information showing the account is based in Turkey — a fact that the owner denies. “I work in international business. I’m currently working in Turkey on a contract,” the user behind the account said.
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, called the update “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square” but acknowledged that the tool did not have foolproof location data, particularly for older accounts.
The function was briefly disabled over the weekend. Late Sunday, Bier said an upgrade would be made overnight that would have an improved “nearly 99.99 percent” accuracy in location tracking. Business Insider reported that a Monday morning test of the feature from a device using a VPN resulted in a notice warning that the “country or region may not be accurate” because of the use of a proxy. A broader accuracy disclaimer says, “The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation. This data may not be accurate and can change periodically.”
NBC News, meanwhile, reported that three of its journalists found that their accounts showed locations that did not correlate to where they are based but instead to places where they had recently traveled.
While users have reason to treat online rhetoric with a healthy dose of skepticism, Newsweek points out that most of the dominating high-profile MAGA accounts on X are, in fact, based in the U.S., including EndWokeness and LibsofTikTok.
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times recently reported a story titled, “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.”
The headline conceals the true nature of the story, which is that one man, Dan Kluver, paid the price for the actions of an illegal immigrant, Romeo Pérez-Bravo, who stole his identity and, while living under his assumed identity, incurred debts, earned wages, racked up traffic violations, and killed a man.
Charles C. W. Cooke calls the headline “preposterous”:
If the attached story were about two taxpayers who, by dint of an innocent mistake at the Treasury, had been allocated the same Social Security number, that description might make sense. But it was not. It was about a man who broke the rules of entry, who broke the rules of the society in which he was trespassing, and who tried to get away with both crimes by riding on the back of an innocent man. That man, Romeo Pérez-Bravo, belongs in prison. His scapegoat, Dan Kluver, deserves an apology, restitution, and a vow from his representatives that they will do better in the future.
Media Misses
• Former MSNBC host Joy Reid shocked conservatives over the weekend when she admitted she would be alarmed if she saw male genitalia in a women’s locker room, even if the person identified as a transgender woman. “I’m alarmed enough when I see a woman with her dangling boobies. If I saw a penis in the ladies’ locker room, I would freak out too,” Reid said on her Reid This Reid That podcast while reacting to a story about a woman who went viral after complaining about a transgender-identifying man repeatedly entering the women’s locker room at a Los Angeles gym.
“What it’s saying is if I turn around, and I see a pee pee — a penis in front of me, inside of the room, I would probably go to management and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why is there somebody — a naked man — in this room?'” said Reid, who has criticized conservatives for their policies to protect female spaces from biological men.
“So, I can see why she would have gone and reported to management ‘there’s a man naked in the . . .’ Now, if they clarified, and they said, ‘Well, trans da da da,’ OK, but I think they should take her concerns also seriously. Because if she’s uncomfortable, does she not have the right to be at least uncomfortable with the situation?”
• Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claims the Trump administration has assembled a “Kremlin-esque” press corps full of “sycophants.”
“It does remind me so much when I was at the State Department and I traveled with John Kerry,” said Psaki, now an MSNBC anchor. “You’d have, like, the Kremlin press corps. I mean they were the ‘press corps’ from ‘media,’ I’m putting that in quotes. But they literally reported to the Kremlin, following the foreign secretary around and foreign minister around. That’s what I think maybe they want.”
The administration has in fact made several changes to the press pool, including allowing nontraditional media sites to apply for briefing-room access and, more recently, announcing that reporters would no longer be authorized to access certain staff offices without an appointment. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the latter change was made after reporters were caught listening in on private conversations.