I’m confident a few privacy activists across Europe are seeking GDPR (etc) arguments to critique the mechanisms behind the location-based exposure of “Foreign, Fake MAGA Agents”; I disagree, but I think there will be ripples of positive & negative consequences until a new norm is established & understood. Of course I’m not the only one thinking this:

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Another former employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about their work at X by their current employer, said the company had decided against deploying the idea in the past for two reasons: concern about creating a visible target for bad actors to manipulate and fear that the label could backfire. If a bad actor successfully spoofed a U.S. location, the platform would effectively be incorrectly verifying it as a trusted American voice.

It’s pretty simple:

• the fakes will adapt to look more credible
• the readers will trust the adaptations
• even greater transparency will be sought or demanded:
• user-via-vpn, user-via-tor-over-vpn, exposure of source IP’s “reputation”, deanonymisation via reputation-mapping attacks, GDPR lawsuits, exposure of source IP, faked source IPs, …
• lather, rinse, repeat forever

The only way to break this loop is not to play the game, but we’re not in that universe at the moment.

However: there are some worthwhile zingers in the comments, here:

Reddit:

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product development, said they’re working to resolve the use of VPNs to alter account location. How?

Nikita Bier, X's head of product development, said they're working to resolve the use of VPNs to alter account location. How?
byu/-mrhyde_ inprivacy