is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country
Turns out that if you pay users for engagement then users will post whatever gets the most engagement, regardless of whether it's true. Who could have forseen this.
To be fair I don't think many expected making people angry would be the best strategy for engagement. You would think people would get tired of being angry and would stop using web sites that keep making them angry.
> is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign
Speculation: they're resolving historical IP addresses against a current IP geolocation database. An IP which belonged to a US company in 2010 may have since been sold to a Nigerian ISP, but that doesn't mean that the user behind that IP in 2010 was actually in Nigeria.
I was going to speculate the same thing. Seems pretty likely... a lot of systems record information about when an account was created, and IP location correlations are period sensitive (at least some of them are... my college is most likely still using its /16 and hasn't moved outside the city where it was founded)
I doubt for the most part it's people being hired. I think mostly it's probably people in low income countries who make a living posting as different identity on social media.
Advertising revenue directly from X, posting affiliate links to products or gambling/crypto sites, and directly asking followers for money. Or they're being paid by clandestine operations such as Internet Research Agency.
These aren't like a single real person pretending to be Americans because of their deep interst in American politics.
These are paid astroturfers probably more like call centers, paid for presumably by all sorts of interests from foreign intelligence services, to businesses (or select executives), to internal political groups or politicians trying to manipulate public opinion.
Both political extremes are suffering from this kind of manipulation where real concerns are twisted and amplified for lets say the more gullible half of the population (gullibility knows know political alignment exclusively). The excluded middle is afraid of the people who have been manipulated this way (death threats also know no political boundaries).
To a billionaire, hiring a few hundred Nigerians to upvote and share their propaganda is so cheap that it’s like you buying a cup of coffee.
They use professional paid services from these low labour cost countries all the time for publicity or to control the narrative.
By some estimates 20-60% of everything you see on social media is generated by a bot farm, depending on the forum in question. An analysis of Reddit showed some subreddits are 80% AI generated.
It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amounts of) money. It's not even unique, there are similar grinds about sports, religion, cute animals, subculture jokes, etc.
The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.
