A world of ratfuckers

Elon Musk and his fellow travelers and lickspittles are convinced that nobody actually has political beliefs to their left, so their appearance in the discourse must be some kind of (((Soros)))-funded conspiracy. This delusion had inadvertently hilarious results when Laura Loomer convinced him to let everyone see where poasters come from:

For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior—particularly foreign influence operations. They’ve insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is actually just “censorship” with various forms of cover, whether academic or operational.

Then Elon Musk rolled out a feature often used by trust & safety teams internally, looking at where accounts were created and/or where they normally post from. Except Musk made the info public. And within hours it revealed exactly why platforms had been doing this kind of work internally in the first place.

And, no, it wasn’t about “censorship” of ideological viewpoints.

On Friday, X began rolling out a feature that revealed where users signed up from and where they were posting from. The feature came following the request of MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who asked Musk back in September to add country-of-origin labels to help identify foreign influence operations. We noted the irony at the time—Loomer and her friends spent years attacking the trust & safety teams who were actually working on this problem.

Whether it was because of Loomer’s request or it was already in the pipeline, Musk rolled it out.

And, within hours, the feature revealed that a ton of super popular “MAGA” accounts were actually posting from all over the globe, with large numbers posting from Eastern Europe, West Africa, or Southeast Asia.

Taibbi knew exactly what the ideological valence of treating any kind of enforcement of terms of service or study of disinformation “censorship” is likely to be, which is why he was the perfect choice to run the TWITTER FILES con.

…pretty much:

At this point X is like 1950s Vienna, a whole place made up entirely of spies, running ops against other spies, with no non-spy people. Or maybe like a 1971 Black Panthers convention where 3/4 of the attendees are conintelrpo.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) Nov 23, 2025 at 7:50 PM