X’s New Feature Reveals Why Trust & Safety Work Was Never About The ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’

For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior—particularly foreign influence operations. They’ve insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is actually just “censorship” with various forms of cover, whether academic or operational.

Then Elon Musk rolled out a feature often used by trust & safety teams internally, looking at where accounts were created and/or where they normally post from. Except Musk made the info public. And within hours it revealed exactly why platforms had been doing this kind of work internally in the first place.

And, no, it wasn’t about “censorship” of ideological viewpoints.

On Friday, X began rolling out a feature that revealed where users signed up from and where they were posting from. The feature came following the request of MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who asked Musk back in September to add country-of-origin labels to help identify foreign influence operations. We noted the irony at the time—Loomer and her friends spent years attacking the trust & safety teams who were actually working on this problem.

Whether it was because of Loomer’s request or it was already in the pipeline, Musk rolled it out.

And, within hours, the feature revealed that a ton of super popular “MAGA” accounts were actually posting from all over the globe, with large numbers posting from Eastern Europe, West Africa, or Southeast Asia.

Almost immediately after the feature launched, people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on US politics appeared to be based outside of the US. Profiles with names like ULTRAMAGA