Last weekend, X released a new About This Account section, accessible by tapping the signup date on a profile, which reveals the location an account is based, among other information. Currently, government affiliated accounts (any with a gray verification check) are exempt from this new feature.
It’s not good for privacy, but does anyone think this is good for transparency? There are a lot of bots on Twitter after all.
Showing the account location isn’t fighting the bots in any way.
X is mostly bots to be honest. And human NPCs.
It’s not “fighting”, just exposing.
Yes, the amount of maga accounts not living in America is amusing. Kind of shows you what is wrong with the system when they show up in Bangladesh and Russia.
TLDR not doxxing, just use a VPN, or better yet don’t use X it’s a waste of time.
The world trying to play America like a puppet is more telling on so many levels, I’m left ineffable.
The lack of awareness, understanding, and the general education about the internet in the US is almost as bad as it is in developing countries (perhaps differently but equally lacking).
We need everyone to read more and develop critical thinking skills at-least such that such news no longer is an indictment of the American education system. I’m still fond of US (the country, not the current government) but it needs to fix itself a lot more fundamentally as there are more other countries that are affected by it than any other country.
If you’re using the mobile app, it also shows the country that’s set in the app store where you downloaded the app from, so VPN only works on the web browser (I think).
maybe second_hitler (literally!) has taken a lesson from the chanologies? But then how does this make sense if VPN is not banned? And also did they collect this data before, so why expose it now?
This is kinda what I’m refering to (for peoples who dont speak parsel).
But does this even work, when foreign actors that influence US politics like the HRE influenced the vote of the polish king or France influenced the elector counts, when they can just use a VPN?
If you use the mobile app, it will also show the location of the app store where you downloaded twitter from, which is usually their home country, so a VPN is useless. If you use the web version, I believe the VPN will mask your location, but that’s if you originally signed up with VPN on.
thats an interesting point! this certainly makes it more difficult and increases friction for psyops that rely on large scale bot manipulation (sybil attack). However regarding the more sophisticated operations comprising of smaller scale but spoofing attacks with high influence / quality accounts (perhaps even organic follower grow or purchase) are not mitigated, as it is - at least in small scale - trivial to create a playstore account under VPN.
What X is doing isn’t doxing. A Conservative influencer asked Elon to show the location of accounts on X, saying that foreigners are destroying the US through social media. X told the influencer to give them 72 hours and it would be done.
A lot of people suspected that a lot of the openly racist & antisemitic MAGA accounts were not really Trump supporters and were likely foreign actors. Turns out, they were correct in their thinking. Stating the location of the accounts was just a way to expose this. Liberal media references these accounts often when making claims against MAGA supporters. Hopefully, this will help end that trend.
I suspect that there is a similar problem on reddit and the rest of them. I think it would be good if they all did something similar. I also believe it’s a national security matter. However, that’s just me.
Sorry to break it to you, but those accounts making racist comments are still in the U.S. and definitely still there.
General reminder to not turn this thread into political discussion here. We’re focusing on the privacy implications of this decision, not whether this denotes doxing or not.
From wikipedia
Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet and without their consent.
Also, on the off chance you are someone who thinks wikipedia is biased:
Doxing, also spelled doxxing, is the act of publicly disclosing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization without consent, typically via the internet, with the intent to harass, intimidate, expose, or otherwise harm the target.
Country is not PII unless it is combined w/ other personally identifiable information. Second, the intent is not present because most of the exposed account have similar political leanings as Elon Musk
Thank you for that. If doxing is specifically about personally identifiable information then technically it isn’t doxing, and the thread’s title is inaccurate.
However, since X/Twitter is now linking location information to X/Twitter users (and by extension their activities) the potential for harm still exists, which is the concern OP has.
Yes, this is literally just a good thing for all Americans.
I am a bit concerned about people in other countries, only because some countries are very small. I would see why some people in the US would not want the state they live in to be exposed for example, but many EU countries are smaller than some US states. Depending on how often X updates your profile, I could see this being problematic for people traveling across the EU, or any similar place with a lot of small countries near each other, because people could notice when you cross borders, which narrows down your precise location pretty substantially.
These privacy concerns are totally solved by changing your setting from Country to Continent/Region though. From a privacy perspective I think that Continent-level disclosure should have been the default, and people could opt-in to Country-level if they post a lot of Country-specific politics and want their profile to back them up.
Honestly see no reason Continent/Region disclosure shouldn’t be the norm on all social media platforms though, this is a good win for X.
I mean our X post was definitely jumping on the current trend, but this is not inherently bad. I don’t think that blog calling us out was warranted 
People on X are only going to read like 2 sentences max. If we want them to do something, the best we can really do is 1) repeat the thing everyone else is saying, 2) give them a thing to do about it. Anything beyond that and we’re out of time. Our post on X accomplished exactly the same thing this 800-word Substack post did:
X lets you switch from a specific country to a broader region or continent. No harm in doing that. Low effort, low friction. Privacy Guides got it right with this suggestion.
While reaching, presumably, way more X users. This posting strategy is what I would call “algorithm bait + good advice,” and I think we should continue doing it on these platforms. I didn’t make the rules of the game 
If people want more nuance that’s what the forum/website is for 
Completely agree. In todays world, I believe this is something that should’ve been implemented years ago, but better late than never. I’m curious now to see if sites such as bluesky, reddit, etc. will follow X’s lead and do something similar.