Some X accounts that post far-right ideologies about Europe are not based in the region and are located in Asia or Australia, Euronews Next has found.
The social media platform said last week it was adding country labels to X accounts “for authenticity”. A user’s IP address, app store regions and posting behaviour all inform what location is shown by the new feature.
Users in the United States identified several accounts based in Eastern Europe, Nigeriaand Pakistan that use “Make America Great Again,” the political slogan made popular by President Donald Trump.
Euronews Next looked into over 30 accounts that posted five popular Eurocentric extremist hashtags on the platform on 24 November and noted their locations.
What did we see in Europe?
One account, called ‘Make Europe Great Again,’ sends out tweets to over 17,000 followers from somewhere in “South Asia,” according to the X feature.
One of the account’s posts has an image that depicts a white man in a suit kicking an Arab person with the caption: “The only way to save Europe – mass deportation and close the borders”.
Other posts support American MAGA movement figures, including President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
A similar account, also called ‘Make Europe Great Again’, is located in Vietnam. The account replies to tweets about transgender conspiracy theories, calls Algeria a “cancer” for France, and says African children are animals.
An account called ‘Make Europa Snow’ posts from Australia. The account posts white supremacy messages, including one that reads wrote “Make Germany Great and White Again”.
Another post wrote that the user would rather live in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s instead of a multicultural country..
Some alleged disinformation aggregators, such as Visegrad and RadioGenoa, were listed as in Poland and Italy, respectively.
How does X moderate bot accounts?
A warning on X profiles says that the country or region that an account is based in “can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation,” and that the data “may not be accurate,” and can change.
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said on 24 November that there will be an update to the location feature “in the next 24 hours” that will have an accuracy rate of 99.99 per cent.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, has attempted to fight bots on his platform. He suggested charging a temporary small fee to new accounts on the platform to stop the “onslaught of bots”.
He argued that artificial intelligence (AI) and troll farms are able to pass online tests, like “are you a bot” CAPTCHA tests, too easily.
In 2023, X started charging new users in the Philippines and New Zealand $1 per year to post on the platform. The “Not a Bot,” programme was a test to “bolster” efforts to reduce spam, manipulation, and bot activity.
On occasion, the platform also does bot sweeps. Bier said in October that X removed 1.7 million bots engaged in “reply spam,” and would do a second sweep for “DM spam”.
Accounts publishing automated content, or content not generated by a human, have a label, according to X.
The platform doesn’t allow for “any activity that attempts to manipulate our platform,” through inauthentic accounts, behaviours or content, its help centre says. That includes various forms of spam and sharing “synthetic and manipulated media”.
Developers are allowed to create AI-powered reply bots to generate “context-aware” responses, but can only do so with approval from X, the company says.