X’s new country-of-origin feature took less than 24 hours to trigger a wave of mass unmasking. Click “Joined” on any profile and there it is: “MAGA NATION” with 392,000 followers posting from Eastern Europe, “RedPillMedia” (108,000 followers) confirmed as Pakistani, and “Republicans Against Trump” and its million followers based in Austria. The feature briefly disappeared Friday after an issue with the Department of Homeland Security allegedly showing a location of “Israel” before returning, but the damage was already done.

Democratic influencer Harry Sisson celebrated this feature as “easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” claiming complete vindication for years of warnings about foreign interference. Ed Krassenstein wondered aloud why so many MAGA influencers were “working for foreign governments.” Author and academic Adam Cochran suggested people were getting “a peek behind the curtain at just how much of the MAGA hatred is just Russian propaganda.”

While some Left-leaning accounts were also “outed”, this partisan scaremongering gives these operations far too much credit. In essence, they are small commercial operations masquerading as grassroots movements — in large part because the US dollars X pays via its revenue-sharing programme go much further in places like Jakarta, Lagos, and Ankara. A Nigerian teenager running “MAGA Scope” wasn’t conducting sophisticated psychological warfare; it was nothing more than a digital content mill, churning out whatever dumb or inflammatory posts (“Should a statue of Jesus be built on the White House lawn?”) would generate the most engagement and therefore the most revenue.

These were engagement farms that spent years successfully monetising American political rage, social media naïveté, and outright incuriosity about the material with which they’re engaging. It reached such a fever pitch that, as Brett Meiselas of MeidasTouch noted, lawmakers began to feel pressured by these accounts. Many mistook foreign engagement-farming for genuine constituent sentiment — or simply failed to tell real content from fake. Utah senator Mike Lee even retweeted one account’s AI-generated “resignation letter” supposedly from Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.

The foreign operators behind these accounts understand American political discourse well enough to score points with it. For example, MAGANationX, broadcasting its “Patriot Voice for We The People” message from Eastern Europe, had (ironically) often accused domestic critics of being bots or foreign agents. Going forward, it will be harder to get away with such brazen hypocrisy.

This location disclosure represents the right compromise on anonymity that I argued for back in 2024. Back then, influencers like Carnivore Aurelius abused the anonymity feature by running a marketing operation built around overpriced liver chips while posing as a health guru. Yet that same anonymity also shielded whistleblowers and major accounts from bad-faith cancellation campaigns. The new feature, then, strikes a balance: you can remain pseudonymous while your geographic location provides basic accountability.

The feature could reduce the bottom-of-the-barrel algorithmic culture war content. Foreign engagement farmers can’t effectively pose as authentic American voices when everyone sees their actual location. For this, Elon Musk deserves credit. But there is also a darker underlying truth: that there is clearly a market for this type of content, which is why so many of these accounts, often based in poorer countries, emerged in the first place.

The demand for ragebait content won’t disappear just because the supply chain got exposed. After all, the foreign element was never the real problem. We were the problem — mindlessly retweeting Nigerian teenagers pretending to be MAGA patriots, sharing Austrian accounts posing as Republicans Against Trump, and letting Bangladeshi content farms shape our political discourse because their posts confirmed our biases. The real story isn’t whether these accounts fooled us — they did, at times to their profit — but why we remain so eager to be fooled.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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