When X marks the spot: Twitter maps its users

On the internet, as the classic New Yorker cartoon famously pointed out, no one knows if you are a dog. Similarly, as a general rule, it’s traditionally been impossible to know where someone you’re arguing with on social media is located – or at least it was, until X rolled out its recent update which purported to show the country/region an account is based in via an “About this account” panel.

The change was initially announced in October, coincidentally following pressure from the American right, concerned that the vital discourse happening on X was being manipulated by shady foreign figures with nefarious interests (presumably as opposed to those shady domestic figures we’ve all become tediously familiar with).

Come late November it was rolled out globally… and immediately generated an entirely new series of uncertainties about whether anyone is actually who they say they are online.

Beginning in the US, enterprising sleuths analysing prominent political “influencer” profiles, pushing strong, partisan opinions, began to notice that significant numbers of them were not, in fact, Americans at all. MAGA-boosting profiles with handles such as @IvankaNews_ and @CharlieK_news were not in fact good ol’ boys or girls posting from a Red state, but in fact based in Nigeria and Eastern Europe respectively. The supremely patriotic @American was in fact found to be posting from, er, Pakistan.

Fast forward a few hours and we got cracking in the UK. A Reform-critical account, @ReformExposed, was leapt upon by right-wing commentators when X flagged it as being based in the US. The co-host of the right-wing “Multipolarity” podcast was gleefully denounced as posting from Russia, based on the app’s information. A poster with strong opinions about the St George’s cross (“it’s our flag and I don’t care what a single ethnic foreigner thinks”) was, apparently, expressing these patriotic sentiments from Malaysia.

Had X suddenly and unwittingly exposed itself as a network riddled with sophisticated foreign agents fomenting division across the West? Perhaps not quite. Amid the rush to expose these apparent duplicitous actors, a crucial detail was being omitted – Twitter was actively admitting that it didn’t really have the faintest idea where a lot of these accounts were actually based.

A small shield icon next to the “location” information on many of the flagged profiles would, when clicked, explain that, due to likely VPN use, any geographical information displayed was at best a guess, and unlikely to be accurate (confirmed by the company’s head of product). But, of course, it’s easy to miss this, or ignore it, or crop the icon out of the screenshot you’re sharing to gain clicks for clout and to dunk on the other side.

Suggested Reading

It’s also important to consider the incentive structures at play here. It is entirely possible, and indeed very probable, that many of the accounts driving the spiciest discourse by posting the most outrageous takes are indeed based in locations other than, for example, the US or UK, but that’s not to say that this is evidence of nefarious interference by enemies of the west.

The fact is that, thanks to the system of creator payouts for verified accounts on X, it’s possible for anyone to earn hundreds or even thousands of pounds a month by posting material that gets views, likes, comments and shares – and what gets engagement is, most often, divisive, polarising, contentious and political (see serial defendant Laurence Fox for an example of this in action). While it’s hard to earn a living in London being an edgelord on X, £600 for engagement-baiting people in the UK goes a long way in Lagos.

So while this episode hasn’t, it turns out, offered conclusive proof that we are constantly manipulated by external forces bent on our destruction, it has demonstrated several other things about the current state of the social media landscape.

Firstly, the monetisation and incentive structures developed by platforms like, but not limited to, X, offer powerful inducements to people in poorer countries to say any old shit on the internet in exchange for clicks, because clicks mean pennies. Secondly, even if you do give people the tools to dig deeper into who the people they are shouting at online actually are, there is no guarantee that they will use these tools properly or responsibly rather than just as another weapon in the seemingly-endless clout-and-culture wars taking place across digital space.

Thirdly, and perhaps most worryingly, it’s the latest in a wearying series of examples across 2025 that you really shouldn’t take anything you see online any more at face value, whether you agree with it or otherwise – something which isn’t likely to get any better in 2026, or maybe ever.