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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like you are overthinking it. There's a segment of the population that share a set of values, they are collectively more active than average in imposing their worldview on the rest, and they've had a strong momentum towards their goals for a while.

They are labeled MAGA, and they are as real as any widespread social movement could be. If your point is that social movements don't really exist as a "material" entity, then we are just arguing semantics.

Probably because a non-insignificant portion of them are literally trolls, Africans and Indians masquerading as True Americans for the grift.

These might be the low-level trolls but there are also thousands of career beaurocrats in our non-democratic eastern neighbor countries who do exactly this as their full time job.

I hate to get into this, but I'm impressed by the ideological juggling. A conspiracy theory about minorities being anti-minority to weaken the majority by provoking them to anger against minorities?

I suppose I'm falling for the trolling right now.

EDIT: I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that OP was referring to individual "Africans and Indians" from the US. I suppose it does make some sense if we are talking about organised action from foreign powers.

> I suppose it does make some sense if we are talking about organised action from foreign powers.

It doesn't even have to be organized.

Ragebait gets clicks. X pays out for engagement. (https://help.x.com/en/using-x/creator-revenue-sharing) The amounts are low by US standards, but nice pay by developing world standards. Thus, a cottage industry of fake accounts arises, without needing nation-scale organization behind it.

That's a fair point, I appreciate being taught something new.

Africans and Indians are not minorities. Sure, if they live in the US, but I'm pretty sure OP referring to people in other countries.

What part of wanting destabilisation for the most powerful country in the world is hard to understand for those that aren't from there?

It’s not trolling. When twitter turned on locations a few weeks ago many of the top maga accounts were revealed to be operating out of Russia or India.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj38m11218xo.amp

You’ll have to decide under “About this account” whether this True American might have intelligently chosen a VPN endpoint in those regions.

elon is literally paying indians to cosplay as "patriotic americans" on Xitter

That doesn't make any sense. Why release a feature to show account locations then?

Because people that don't think will believe the shown location is accurate, instead of whatever the corrupt jack-ass running the site wants it to show. Any account that praises him will be a "verified human US citizen"

Yes that feature was long overdue

Yeah should have been done by Dorsey a long time ago.

Afaik X is the only social media service that does this so far.

Such a simple feature that has a major quality of life improvement.

> Afaik X is the only social media service that does this so far.

Facebook has had it for years.

https://www.facebook.com/help/320055788882014

Per your link, this isn't for every account. Just for pages that reach a large number of people. Good step though.

There really is no privacy concern to list the country of a user. I don't know why FB has to qualify it just for large pages only.

It's not really a useful feature because it's super easy to spoof once you know you have to.

I think the comment you're responding to just means monetizing high-visibility creators in general as a systemic practice, not deliberately facilitating deception.

Possibly when it comes to the "paying" part.

But my response was directed towards "indians cosplaying as patriotic americans".

I'm on the fence when it comes to paying people for posts, but that wasn't really the heart of the statement.

It's intent of action vs. actual action.

Elon may not be _intending_ to pay foreigners to cosplay as patriotic Americans.

However, X pays people based on engagement. A number of people outside the USA have figured out that if they post outrageous shit to Americans, they get engagement -- and therefore earn money. So in fact, Elon _is_ paying foreigners to cosplay as Americans, but it might not have been what he meant to do.

There were a ton of "I'm a red blooded god fearing patriot"-type accounts being operated out of Russia, India, Pakistan, etc - the BBC link in another chain of this thread covers it. I think this is more about the global economy and the economics of western political engagement on digital platforms rather than some grand conspiracy, personally, but in a very literal sense, the post could be described as not technically inaccurate, even if missing the point and assigning personalized blame where it probably isn't warranted.

> WHO exactly is MAGA really? I am no longer convinced that MAGA is "real". Or really significant.

Many are easy to spot. All the people with giant "Make America Great Again" flags in their front yard or attached to their lifted pickup trucks. The people in my neighborhood who have their Christmas light decor as a giant sign of "TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING". Funny how they complain about the leftists killing Christmas by removing Christ but they went from having a nativity scene to having TRUMP take up their holiday decorations.

This org? Over the top patriotic branding (FREEDOM chat, logo is an eagle, etc). They make a point to be on Truth Social. On their Truth Social profile they have interviews on Breitbart and similar right-leaning people, including Laura Trump. Their brand Truth Social page constantly complaining about SOCIALISM.

If you're not seeing the MAGA alignment of this chat platform you're just not looking very hard.

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