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
TRUMP
incredible things are happening on x, the every-scam app
- the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) (@merovingians.bsky.social) 2025-11-23T06:26:14.802Z
X has changed their policy and now you can see where the accounts are based.Here's an influencer from Texas"
- Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) 2025-11-21T18:36:21.126Z
Hey if Musk had left on the location feature, we might find out the whole platform is a fake!Here's "America Man" located in Indonesia."Native American Soul" located in Bangladesh."MAGA News" based in South Asia."Joe Rogan HQ News" located in Pacific East Asia.
- Melissa Nadia Viviana
(@resistrebelrevolt.net) 2025-11-23T02:55:03.270Z
X's new About this account" tool reveals that dozens of pro-Russian and MAGA accounts with tens of thousands of followers, long posing as American or Russian, are actually created and run from India, Bangladesh, and other South Asian countries.
- WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) 2025-11-22T13:35:38.313Z
Not a single pro-russia account is located in Russia
- M Ocinato
(@mr-orcinator.bsky.social) 2025-11-22T19:39:27.432Z
The scale of the problem isn't just about foreign actors exploiting the platform-it's about Musk creating the economic incentives that make it profitable. As the popular Derek Guy account noted, Musk instituted an engagement-based" payment structure that pays out money based on how many views, retweets, and comments you get. For people in lower income regions, trolling on politically sensitive topics in America to generate likes and clicks (especially now that they can use AI to do so) isn't just easy-it's an actual business model that Musk built into the platform.
Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.
- derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) 2025-11-23T09:23:23.443Z
This isn't a bug in the system. It's a feature Musk designed, then acted surprised when it attracted exactly the kind of behavior that trust & safety teams used to work to identify and limit.
While it's fascinating that X actually rolled this out, it should raise questions about those who have spent the past few years stewing in that cesspool of foreign rage-bait manipulation, insisting it was somehow an accurate portrayal of public opinion.
Now, there are some limitations to the system. X's head of product noted that uses of VPNs or Starlink may have the wrong country show up on their account. But VPN usage doesn't explain accounts with thousands of posts over months, all originating from the same foreign location, all focused on American political rage-bait, all monetizing engagement through Musk's payment system.
This is exactly the kind of coordinated inauthentic behavior that trust & safety teams were built to identify and address. Not to censor" ideological viewpoints, but to surface when what looks like organic American political discourse is actually foreign actors gaming the system for profit.
For years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have insisted that anyone working on these problems was part of a censorship industrial complex" designed to silence political speech. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan repeated these lies. They treated trust & safety work as a threat to democracy itself.
Then Musk rolled out one basic feature, and within hours proved exactly why trust & safety work existed in the first place.
Will Taibbi or Shellenberger acknowledge they spent years attacking the people who were actually trying to protect the integrity of online discourse? Will they admit they helped dismantle the very systems that could have prevented what Musk just exposed?
I doubt it. They're too busy on X, swimming in the very manipulation they insisted didn't exist.