Dem
47
GOP
53
It is no secret that many of the accounts of eX-Twitter and other social media sites are fake. In particular, accounts that purport to be from Americans are often from people in distant countries who are not Americans. Last Saturday. eX-Twitter rolled out a new feature that could expose some of the fakes. It allows readers to see where an account is actually based.
Reporters are already digging. One of them discovered that the account from Ivanka Trump, which has over 1 million followers, isn't from the president's daughter. It is from a different "Ivanka Trump," who lives in Nigeria. People who thought it was the one who lives in Florida will be surprised if they discover this, which they can easily do now. Other accounts from people who claimed to be true American patriots turn out to be from people in Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, and elsewhere.
Many accounts are highly political. It appears that foreign actors posing as Americans have been illegally interfering in American elections, possibly for years. Making this visible is only a start, though. Another thing the algorithms that recommend content could do is prioritize content that actually originated from the reader's country (unless the reader specifically asked not to do so). Users should also be able to limit content that they see to be from a specific country or countries and ban content from specific countries. Yet another step would be for the platforms to make a very serious effort to determine which users are humans and which are bots.
One big problem is determining where a user actually is. In many cases, the sending computer's IP address gives that away. If you visit WhatIsMyIPAddress.com it will tell you where it thinks you are. However, by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network), you can hide your true IP address. Turn on your VPN, if you have one, point it to some place on a different continent, and try WhatIsMyIPAddress.com again.
However, VPNs can be defeated with some effort. Each of the larger VPN companies has at most a few hundred VPN servers around the world. It is not hard for ex-Twitter, Facebook, etc. to compile a list of all of them and simply block all connections from them. In all, there probably aren't more than 10,000 VPN servers in use. That might not work 100% of the time, but blocking all the VPN servers from the 50 biggest VPN companies would be a start. (V)