It’s widely known and reported this is happening. I guess this might get the message to people in the back who aren’t paying attention… but given we’ve had most of a decade of off-and-on coverage of this, anyone left is probably unreachable, and a bunch of them have been primed to ignore this exact sort of headline as “fake news”.

It's been known for a while this is just verification. Accounts give themselves away all the time accidentally through phrases or tells. eg: A tweet from an account claiming to be from the US talking about Texas succession that mentions 'warm water ports', very few people care or think about that because all the ports on the continental US don't freeze over in the winter. (In fact very few countries do because most have as many warm water ports as they need, one of the few with significant issues with this is... Russia)

No one likes to be the bad messenger saying to Americans that they were fooled and all that hatred against their opponents (opposite party) was actually induced, not born out of their own superiority.

It’s going to get flagged off of HN front page within the hour like it did the last two times someone posted about it

We've known of foreign influence campaigns targeting Americans on social media for a long time. A significant number of HN users have a vested interest in pretending it isn't the case. Some of them are making money off it. Others are too proud to entertain the notion that they might be the gullible victims of rage-bait and disinformation. Posts on the subject usually gets flagged pretty quick, but it's getting harder to ignore the truth.

Why?

Govs doing influence campaigns was admitted during the twitter files [1]. While it's the US-relationship, Twitter is a global company so they're going to have other country relationships.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#Nos._8%E2%80%939...

No surprise to us geeks, of course. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" and all that.

The big surprise (disappointment) to me was witnessing how "do your own research" looks in practice.

  - Type in some search terms.
  - Open handful of the top hits.
  - Believe everything. 
  - Even the obvious scams & ads.

There's something about media that bypasses most adult's innate skepticism. Like if I told some stranger (IRL) that saffron cures baldness, they'd be all GTFO. But hear it from a talk show host or read it on Facebook, well shit, it must be true.

Hard to compete with leaders being accused of raping, corruption, and and calling for execution of political opponents for newsworthiness.

this isn't surprising. as the article mentions, this has been going on since at least 2016. You can expect influence campaigns to be on every social network and comment section.

The problem is that these companies do nothing about this.

They (major news networks) are owned by Trump friendlies (Bezos/WaPo, Soon-Shiong/LAT, etc.) or they are afraid of Trump’s influence.

Musk's like a transparent kid these days. Anything he touches seem to disappear from media - there is such thing as bad publicity after all, I guess.

I mean it's been pretty obvious for a while...

the people who would care already knew about this. the people who didn't know about this don't care (or are in denial).

> wild that this isn't bigger news

Give it time.

So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.

We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample. It may be individual profiteers. It could be one, or multiple, coördinated campaigns. X may be complicit or clueless.

I’d be surprised if serious journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to need to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.

(That said, the premise is incorrect. In limited cases, it’s gaining traction [1].)

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-...

That people from third world countries are making slop political accounts to make money? Hardly a news story at all

It was widely reported that right wing influencers were being directly paid by Russia for their disinformation. People like Tim Poole were demonstrated to be on the Russian payroll but nothing ever came from it because conservatives don't care. They have no real values or beliefs other than winning and making people they don't like suffer. The "moderates" are too busy trying to decide what the right compromise between fascism and freedom are. The liberals are too busy trying to find their next way to punch left while platforming fascists as allies.

Most of this, to some degree, has been well established for a while.

American Republicans have relied heavily on foreign interference to achieve their goals. From social media manipulation to laundering illegal political bribes, Republicans have been doing it.