Way too many social media CEOs claim that if they just force their users to dox themselves, that it will somehow prevent all the toxic engagement. You need look no further than Facebook to see where it goes. Not only does the toxicity not go away, but Facebook makes tons of money off political ads and "boosted" posts; they even have had an office of sorts in China, where Facebook is banned, for the purpose of making it easier for Chinese to sell ads/engagement on Facebook. And it's not just China doing this.
I'd reckon Twitter's long-term goal isn't to make the trolls go away, but to pay for the privilege of visibility.
It is telling that none of the online ad platforms engage with the advertising standard council type organizations that defined the standards that old school media use to self regulate. Most people don't realize that this was once a solved problem.
I disagree. Knowing where an account is from helps gauge its authenticity.
All it does is open second order businesses faking the authenticity
> You need look no further than Facebook to see where it goes.
FB has required real identities for a long, long time.
I don’t think that case study provides a good before/after analysis.
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People are “toxic” in general. They kill each other.
But removing anonymity reduces it.
Then you can just find the enemy easier to kill.
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so they'll pay for VPNs/Proxies with residential IPs in their desired location.
heck twitter will probably later offer you an option to buy it themselves or an option to set your desired location if you just pay for X++ premium bot services.
I assume most accounts getting exposed now basically started with the assumption that this info would not be exposed publicly, but they will adapt.
So this is like a one time shot of transparency, that will quickly be useless (although I’ve been hearing it has been rolled back already - some speculation is because it exposed that the majority of MAGA boosters were not US based)
Some sort of mdl scheme where people can verify their location without disclosing their entire identity would be nice.
No, it exposed the groypers and racists masquerading as MAGA or conservatives who are from foreign countries.
Whats the difference? Both groups are firmly MAGA and supported by MAGA.
Yeah, and they will delete their accounts and start over, only logging in when they're on a US terminated VPN.
Whoever was following these people aren't taking a hard look at themselves in the mirror now. They're just searching out the same content that is "really" American.
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I believe Twitter shows if account uses vpn
How would you know a residential ip vpn is a vpn? Twitter won’t.
I welcome this change. I wonder what the actual resulting impact will be, however.
Don’t wonder, it’s obvious. When you turn on the light you see the cockroaches. Any transparency changes incentives. Look how the dynamics have changed overnight. Next, Twitter has to do something about the rage engagement payola.
Why product managers overseeing any forum platform have not implemented something easy and obvious as account location metadata is something sociologists need to study.
> Why product managers overseeing any forum platform have not implemented something easy and obvious as account location metadata is something sociologists need to study.
All social platforms of the last decade rely on "engagement" and bots/trolls/fake accounts/etc contribute to that, both directly and in terms of posting inflammatory content that the masses then "engage" with.
> Why product managers overseeing any forum platform have not implemented something easy and obvious as account location metadata is something sociologists need to study.
This was a common-ish feature for a long time and major sites like 4chan have had it in one form or another I think for literally decades at this point.
Maybe because it is so easy to fake, that putting that signal on there lends undue credence to it.
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In six months they'll make hiding your location a feature of the paid subscription.
Well, a hidden location would be a signal too
Could become an in group signal, essential creating so much noise the signal is no longer valuable
one can imagine the influencers saying they X is lying or I fear for my safety and them the whole bandwagon joining in
We get to see this:
I think it’s obvious these kinds of accounts were for engagement. Happy to see grifter accounts from two bit locales exposed for what they are.
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Related:
X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
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