There is a scene in season two of HBO’s initially well-regarded science fiction series Westworld—the story eventually became too confusing for even die-hard fans—in which most of the attendees at a fancy party are simultaneously revealed to be robots. The human guests are dumbfounded, having been fooled by the ruse. This is just one example of a common science fiction trope: a large number of people being revealed as robots, or aliens, or clones.
From the perspective of many political conservatives who are active on social media, last weekend felt a little like that.
This is because Elon Musk finally rolled out a long-requested feature on X, the site formerly known as Twitter: It is now possible to see the geographic location where a given user likely resides. (Yes, it’s possible to fool the system with a VPN.) And what this has revealed is that some—by no means all, but some—highly visible accounts associated with rightwing politics, support for President Trump, extremely anti-interventionist America First foreign policy views, and more sinisterly, racist and antisemitic comments, are not American at all. They reside in foreign countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh.
This doesn’t mean their opinions are to be entirely discounted, of course. X is a global social media app, and people are welcome to make their views on American politics known, even if they are not Americans. But let’s be clear about what was happening here: A certain number of users were cosplaying as “heritage Americans,” and implying that their ancestors arrived on the continent centuries ago—and purporting to speak on behalf of American conservatives, MAGA, etc. And they were treated as such: Many on the right have fretted about the rise of Nick Fuentes and other explicitly antisemitic commentators, and have pointed to racist commentary from self-described America First X accounts as evidence of the surge in popularity of these very divisive views.
It may be coming as something of a relief, then, to discover that a not trivial number of these divisive posters are inauthentic. To be even clearer, they are grifters, taking advantage of Musk’s very generous revenue-sharing program to earn money on X by positing culture war clickbait that generates massive controversy and anger, and thus engagement. It’s the Nigerian scammer archetype for the social media age; no longer is the Nigerian prince trying to convince gullible Americans to wire him money—your attention is all he needs. And the scammers did not masquerade solely as rightists; there are also examples of inauthentic progressive behavior.
While these developments probably call into question the wisdom of the revenue-sharing system in the first place, it is nevertheless a positive development that we now have more information about the motives of some of the most obnoxious social media users. There’s a chance that this even improves online political dialogue in a small way. Responses to the new tool have been almost universally positive: Everyone from the extremely conservative Matt Walsh to centrist Republican Trump critic Jonah Goldberg to progressive writer Jared Holt had good things to say about location disclosure. My Free Media friends Amber Duke and Niall Stanage approved as well. I do too.
