It started with a single tap. On Friday morning, November 22, 2025, X users noticed something new buried inside their profiles: a small panel called “About This Account.” Click the join date, and suddenly, details that had never been visible before appeared.
Where the account originated, how many times has the username changed? Whether the app came from Google Play or Apple’s App Store. Within hours, the platform erupted in accusations, disbelief, and a flood of screenshots that nobody had seen coming.
Patriots From Eastern Europe
The first domino fell when someone checked MAGANationX, an account with nearly 400,000 followers. Its bio proudly declared “Patriot Voice for We The People,” wrapped in American flags and MAGA slogans. The new transparency tool revealed something else entirely: the account was created in Eastern Europe.
Then came MAGA Scope, featuring Trump in a tuxedo with an American flag emoji, which originated in Nigeria in 2024. IvankaNews, a fan account devoted to Trump’s daughter with roughly one million followers posting about immigration threats, also pinged Nigeria.
Half the Movement Operating Overseas
Left-wing influencer Micah Erfan watched the revelations pile up and called it what it looked like: total armageddon for the online right. It appeared that half of their large accounts were foreigners posing as Americans all along, he observed. The pattern kept spreading. America First, an account with over 67,000 followers, was running from Bangladesh.
Dark MAGA, with more than 15,000 followers, operated out of Thailand. Threads began compiling lists of pro-MAGA accounts that claimed to be American patriots but were actually foreign operatives scattered across the globe.
The Feature That Disappeared
Then something strange happened. Just hours after going live, the “About This Account” feature disappeared entirely from the platform. Users who had been frantically screenshotting foreign-operated MAGA accounts suddenly found the tool gone, sparking immediate speculation that exposure of right-wing influencers’ actual locations prompted the sudden removal.
When it quietly returned, one critical detail had changed: the original creation location was no longer displayed; only the current location data remained.
Rough Edges and VPN Excuses
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product development, stepped in to acknowledge that the feature had a few rough edges that would be resolved by Tuesday. Critics immediately seized on an apparent loophole: users opening accounts while connected to virtual private networks could show origins reflecting VPN locations rather than actual residences.
Bier promised the company would address VPN-related discrepancies and add indicators when location data might not be 100 percent accurate. However, the damage was already done, and the screenshots had been archived across social platforms.
Lawmakers Pressured By Foreign Trolls
Brett Meiselas, journalist and co-founder of MeidasTouch, warned viewers to think carefully about what they were witnessing. Foreign influence operations were currently happening on the app, he said, and people needed to consider the lawmakers who felt pressured by accounts like these and the disinformation that spread as a result of all these accounts.
The implication hung in the air like smoke: American elected officials might be responding to what they believed were constituent voices when those voices were actually operated from internet cafes in Lagos or apartments in Eastern Europe.
The Greatest Day On The Platform
Democratic influencer Harry Sisson called it easily one of the greatest days on the platform, seeing all these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States. For Democrats who had been warning about foreign interference for years, the revelations felt like complete vindication. But the chaos wasn’t limited to one political side.
The transparency tool revealed foreign-operated accounts across the spectrum, with some liberal accounts pushing Democratic narratives, which were also found to be operating from outside the United States.
A Pattern Already In Motion
For those monitoring online influence campaigns, the exposures weren’t entirely shocking. During the 2024 election cycle, the Centre for Information Resilience, an independent nonprofit research group, found more than a dozen accounts that stole photos of European fashion models and influencers to pose as young, attractive women supporting Trump.
The accounts manipulated everyday Instagram images of women at beaches or walking dogs, adding MAGA hashtags and pledges to vote for Trump, then amplified divisive content across the platform.
Russian Money, Unwitting Influencers
Last year brought even darker revelations. The Department of Justice discovered that popular right-wing influencers, including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, were reportedly working unwittingly for a company that turned out to be a Russian influence operation.
Federal prosecutors alleged that RT, a Russian state media network, funneled nearly $10 million through foreign shell entities to a Tennessee-based content creation company called Tenet Media. The influencers claimed they were unaware of the Russian ties.
No Legal Barriers To Division
There is virtually nothing stopping someone from a different country from using social media sites to sow political division in U.S. politics while earning a profit. The business model appears straightforward and disturbingly effective: build large followings by posting inflammatory political content that generates engagement platforms reward with monetization opportunities, then operate from countries where labor costs are dramatically lower than in the United States.
Whether driven by ideology or income remains unclear in most cases, but the scale suggests both motives are in play.
Authenticity In Question
If accounts presenting themselves as patriotic Americans are actually operated from Nigeria, Eastern Europe, or Bangladesh, how much of X’s political discourse is authentic? How many viral posts shaping American political opinions come from people who don’t live in the country and may not even believe what they’re posting? The questions cut to the heart of what users see when they scroll through what Bier called the global town square.
Screenshots claiming MAGA accounts showing origins in Japan, Pakistan, New Zealand, and other countries flooded timelines as rival factions cross-checked the origins of accounts they’d been arguing with for months.
Securing The Integrity Problem
Bier described the transparency feature as an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square, confirming that fixes would be pushed out through the week. The platform promised to provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of content they encounter. But the tension between transparency and complexity was already apparent.
Legitimate users who travel internationally, work for global organizations, or use privacy tools for security reasons could be mistaken for malicious foreign actors based on a simple country label.
Bot Farms And Foreign States
Research has identified what it calls fake MAGA influencers who use America First branding to target conservative audiences but are linked to large-scale bot farms, evidenced by the creation of massive numbers of accounts at opportune moments on X. Coordinated account-creation spikes during events like Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition were followed by synchronized amplification of identical narratives during crises.
The analysis revealed that inauthentic engagement was being deployed for information warfare, linking geopolitical interests of hostile foreign states with prominent, seemingly authentic domestic influencers.
A Movement At War With Itself
As screenshots continued spreading, the MAGA ecosystem on X began to look less like a political movement and more like a stadium riot where nobody could decide who started it. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna weighed in from her personal account, noting that all of these purportedly pro-American accounts promoting infighting within MAGA were actually foreign grifters. She warned that the foreign operation was real and so were the bot accounts.
The internal fractures were becoming impossible to ignore as the transparency tool peeled back layers of anonymity around coordinated political messaging.
What Comes Next
Bier promised that incorrect location data would be updated periodically based on the best available information, occurring on a delayed and randomized schedule to maintain privacy. Whether the feature will ultimately reduce foreign influence operations or drive them to adopt better VPN practices remains an open question.
One unexpected trend emerged from the chaos: users became obsessed with checking their own About This Account tab, with some reporting hundreds of thousands of views within hours, whether out of curiosity or suspicion.
The Consequences Are Already Here
As the 2026 election cycle approaches, these revelations land at a critical moment. Millions of Americans with foreign-operated accounts may now face uncomfortable questions about which voices influenced their political views. Accounts posting about immigration, gun rights, election fraud, and cultural issues, often accompanied by American flag emojis and patriotic language, may have been doing so from overseas, motivated not by conviction but by the clicks and engagement that generate revenue on platforms engineered to reward outrage.
Musk probably didn’t expect a single tap on a profile to set off this much noise, but that’s precisely what happened over the weekend.