Glenn Reynolds writes for the New York Post about an eye-opening action from the billionaire owner of the former Twitter.
Online anonymity today isn’t what it once was. But this weekend we learned how extensive — and how damaging — the Net of a Million Lies remains.
While users of X (formerly Twitter) are allowed to use anonymous handles and write their own personal descriptions, the company’s servers are privy to key details about every account holder.
Ordinarily the service doesn’t police what you say about yourself.
Ordinarily.
But on Friday Elon Musk, having figured out that a lot of influential X accounts weren’t what they claimed to be, activated an X feature showing where users were actually posting from — and uncovered (at least) a million lies.
Turns out a lot of users claiming to be disillusioned Trump voters, or anti-Israel Americans, are actually foreign frauds.
Like the one that posted: “Trump is Israel First. I’m done with MAGA. I hope Republicans lose.”
Americans turning on Trump over Israel?
Nope. The account was based in Turkey.
Likewise the woke-right “groyper” movement supposedly elevating white supremacist Nick Fuentes seems to be largely a foreign sham, and “Ron Smith, MAGA Hunter,” a prolific anti-Trump poster with a substantial following, turns out to be from Kenya.
Many users billing themselves as “Native American” with accounts specializing in divisive racial attacks on white people are actually foreign, and mostly from Bangladesh.
And so on, and so on.
“This is an absolutely massive story of foreign ops shaping our political and cultural discourse,” Dave Rubin wrote. “Will the set of influencers who fell for it look in the mirror?”
It’s ironic, of course, that the 2016 screams of “foreign influence” on the Trump campaign have now been replaced by actual evidence of foreign influence — mostly aimed against Trump.
But there’s a bigger story here.
The United States, for all its size and power, is prone to the whims of public opinion — and its communications are largely open to outsiders.
