On the Internet No One Knows You’re a “MAGA patriot” in Lagos

This weekend, X quietly did something useful.

A new “About this account” feature now shows where accounts are based. Some of the loudest bluecheck anon “MAGA patriot” influencers—accounts that shout about the deep state and immigrants and whatnot—were outed as being in India. Or Pakistan. Or Nigeria. Or Eastern Europe.

Not “flyover country.” Not “real America.”

The accounts pushed back, of course. Some claimed it was a bug, or VPN confusion. X employees said the feature was still a work in progress. But the fact that some of X’s most popular right-wing “grassroots” voices appear to be based overseas surprised exactly no one familiar with how political junk content works.

In this newsletter I’m going to talk about two things—incentives, and supply and demand—and how they intersect with a finding that has consistently held for the last ten years of research into online propaganda: that the MAGA right is a particularly receptive niche.

The teenagers in Macedonia who got there first

The cleanest way to understand what’s happening on X is to go back in time to Veles, Macedonia in 2016.

A group of teenagers figured out they could make money by driving Americans to websites plastered with ads. They spun up WordPress sites, wrote clickbait headlines, and pushed links into Facebook groups and Pages.

At first they tried a mix of content: generic viral junk, memes, and politics. They worked on sensational stories about the Democrats fighting it out in the caustic 2016 primary: some Bernie things, some Hillary things.

Then they tried pro-Trump stories. The numbers went crazy.

They watched the metrics: Conservative users were more likely to click and share the links, and visit the sites. They A/B tested the headlines: Every time they made the stories a little more outrageous—“Pope Endorses Donald Trump —the engagement went up.

So they made more. Soon entire towns were getting rich.

The Macedonian teenagers didn’t care about the politics. The American right, especially the emerging MAGA ecosystem, was simply a dream customer: highly engaged, highly inflamed, and extremely willing to click through to garbage sites that paid out ad revenue.

Supply responds to demand.

If one group of people reliably rewards you with attention and money for a particular kind of content, you make more of that content for that group, whether you live in Ohio or Macedonia.

“Do progressives fall for bots?” Yes. But look at where the market is.

When I say that foreign grifters disproportionately target the American right, it sounds partisan or perhaps smug. So let’s be clear about what I am—and am not—saying.

Do progressives fall for bots and fake accounts? Of course they do. The Russian Internet Research Agency, which did care about the politics of what it posted, ran some very successful left-coded accounts during the 2016 election, particularly those posing as Black activists. Those pages leaned into real grievances about racism, exploiting real fractures in American society.

Propagandists probe every fault line. They impersonate BLM activists, lib moms, MAGA shitposters, wellness gurus. If there is a community with a grievance, someone somewhere has built a persona to work it. State actors working ideologically-motivated campaigns will often run content on both sides; they aren’t trying to profit, and may feel that any potential effect is worth it.

But when you zoom out and look at where the bulk of the for-profit fake news and foreign political spam targeting the US tends to focus, study after study finds the same thing:

• traffic to known fake-news sites
• audiences for junk-news Facebook pages
• engagement with content trafficking in misleading claims and conspiracy theories

All are heavily skewed to the MAGA right, and often the older MAGA right.

That’s not a moral judgment. That’s a description of the market. It’s not the largest part of the consumer news content market – it’s a niche. But if you are a foreign grifter looking for a US customer base, it has been the broadest and most consistent target. It’s a niche where people are willing to follow a random, anonymous account and treat it as a trusted voice on everything from elections to vaccines to border security – boosting its content to their friends as well.

“Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.” 

Now let’s consider that demand pattern in relation to the platform Elon Musk has built.

X today is:

• more ideologically right-wing than old Twitter,
• paying high-engagement accounts a share of ad revenue, and
• selling blue checkmarks to anyone who subscribes—no meaningful identity verification required for the standard blue badge.

If you’re an enterprising foreign actor with a decent grasp of American culture-war tropes, this is perfect:

• You set your username to something like “AntiWokeMom1776,” slap an eagle emoji in bio, and say you’re in Texas.
• You buy a checkmark so you look legit to casual users.
• You post a nonstop stream of rage-bait about immigrants, vaccines, litterboxes in schools, how censored you are, whatever your thing is.
• You watch the ad revenue and subscription payments roll in.

X is a target-rich environment with strong virality potential. The monetization structure rewards ragebait and culture warring. Compounding this, Elon let himself be radicalized by ideologues into believing that “disinformation” was just a term that belonged in scare quotes, so he fired the team that used to hunt for networks of accounts that manipulated Twitter’s users. I used to work with that team as an outside academic analyzing the data sets they would make public; it was a constant cat-and-mouse game, because there is very little penalty for a manipulator beyond losing an account and having to start over.

So when X’s “About this account” panel suddenly reveals that one of those big “patriot” culture war accounts is registered in India or Nigeria, that’s not a shocking twist. That is exactly what you’d predict when you understand how this market works.

The only mildly surprising thing is that X chose to surface this at all. To be clear, it should be commended – Facebook did this years ago. It’s the kind of transparency that makes sense. Users have a right to know something about the agitators constantly trying to rile people up in the digital commons; we can protect anonymity while still surfacing signals that help people make informed decisions about whether an account is an honest broker or a bad faith bullshit artist. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Stop Subsidizing the Rage Farmers

If you pay handsomely for rage, you will get a lot of rage. If you reward anonymous accounts with money and status for stoking that rage, you will get a lot of anonymous accounts doing exactly that—no matter where they actually live.

The left no doubt feels some schadenfreude, though I’m sure some big #Resist accounts will turn out to be non-American as well. I saw Pirate Wires had already posted digging into the Israel/Palestine accounts that fight online, highlighting similar inauthenticity—this problem happens outside of the US, too. I’m currently in a car driving up to see family for the holidays (husband is driving; kids are DJing) and don’t have access to good tools to do any firsthand research beyond writing this contextual explainer, unfortunately, but more and more examples are popping up on the socials. Go look for the ones that are rage-baiting on issues you care about, not just the ones targeting your enemies. 😉

The redpill set won’t care about this coming from me. But if you’re on the right and you were genuinely surprised by what X showed you today, you should understand that for the better part of the last ten years:

• foreign grifters have viewed you as a soft target and a reliable revenue stream,
• platforms have chosen to structure their products in ways that encourage exploitation, and
• politicians who benefit from the rage would rather attack “disinformation pseudo-experts” (always with the scare quotes lol) who look for these manipulators, rather than admit their own base is being farmed.

Anyway, this is what happens when you take a platform that is primarily a gladiatorial arena for the culture wars, bolt on a revenue-sharing program, and turn “verification” into a paid costume that confirms nothing about who anyone is. As long as X pays anonymous accounts to keep its most agitated users online and engaged, “patriots” in Lagos will tell you what it means to be a real American.

People don’t have to change their politics. There are plenty of real, authentic creators who believe and say these same sorts of things. But if platforms don’t change the incentives, ordinary users will stay exactly what the system has optimized us to be: the marks in an unyielding battle for attention in which grifters and companies profit from pitting Americans against each other. That was hopefully made just a little bit clearer today.