Hundreds Of MAGA Accounts Exposed As Hostile Foreign Ops By Twitter Bug

On Friday night, Elon Musk introduced a new transparency feature on Twitter that was, in the eyes of those it accidentally exposed as foreign influence operations, just a bit too effective. As was announced by Head of Product Nikita Bier earlier this week, the new feature would make the origin and current location of accounts visible. The feature initially limited visibility to account owners, but in what appears to be a major bug, those locations became publicly visible—a massive problem for large swaths of accounts pretending to be American.

It’s well-known that MAGA utilizes foreign bots to sow division and spread propaganda, but the extent to which this happens was accidentally revealed when Twitter’s new feature went off the rails. If you were lying about your location, people quickly noticed when the “About This Account” feature sold everyone out. For a few hours, everyone’s location was revealed to everyone on the platform before the feature was paused. Bier has promised a “better” version — likely with opt-outs that compromise the feature’s integrity — will come out later.

While Musk’s team worked diligently to stem the spread of information, those few hours were enough to “out” hundreds of accounts. Folks worked quickly to document some of the accounts that were lying to American conservatives, who found themselves becoming more and more furious about “stolen elections” and “Deep State” plots someone in Nigeria told them were real.

MAGA Accounts Exposed As Foreign Op

While the feature was stressful for fakes, it was beneficial for people who care about the integrity of the accounts they follow — and the identities of the ones sharing propaganda. Many “fan” accounts that pushed MAGA propaganda, it turns out, are from Macedonia, Thailand, South Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and more.

While accounts were found on both the Left and Right, it seems that a significant percentage of these propaganda mills leaned toward Trump. Even “Maple MAGA” accounts were revealed to be foreign ops — as well as many alleged “Free Palestine” accounts that were intended to divide the Left. Notably, the popular account “CounterAIPAC” is based in Egypt — a strange development for an account that is hyper-focused on American political funding.

At this point, it’s fair to ask if any part of MAGA is genuine. And since studies show that conservatives largely lack the ability to discern truth from fiction, this is a huge problem — especially since our President recently posted misinformation about Obama collecting royalties from the Affordable Care Act after believing a well-known satire website was real.

While Musk claims this feature is intended to “restore trust,” the speed with which he killed it after it began outing his precious paid Blue-Check customers, like someone turned the lights on at a cockroach party, indicates it was never intended to be a neutral feature.

It would be unrealistic to say MAGA’s entire online army is fake — actual stupid people do exist. But it is completely fair to say that the MAGA movement is largely fabricated and its ideas stem from someone sitting in a server room in Dubai or Delhi wearing a digital MAGA hat.