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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income.

I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being Indian people pretending to be British

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X famously implemented a feature that revelaed where the posters were from. Sure you can use a VPN, but Musk changed the rules all of a sudden and exposed a lot of accounts posting about issues from other countries.

Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.

I think the difference is Elon is actually a Twitter addict and he's genuinely on there every day engaging with this stuff, so he probably saw the memes.

I get the sense Zuckerberg is a lot more disconnected from everyday Facebook and Insta content

Which is actually healthier, like a drug dealer that doesn't consume his own product

Healthier for him, unhealthier for society that is forced to suffer the effects of mass consumption of his product.

Nothing we have seen since musk‘s acquisition of Twitter indicates that his close proximity/high usage has led to better results for society.

Healthier - perhaps, although I do prefer when my dealers use the same product they sell to me.

Which led Twitter to release a feature allowing you to see which country accounts were originally made which confirmed a lot of suspicions about Indian/Pakistan accounts positing politics stuff because it goes viral and pays. Other sites would benefit from that sort of feature to at least set the bar higher.

Didn't they almost immediately retract that after it became clear so many of the GOP adjacent accounts were based offshore?

No they released the feature. The more controversial part was X also announced they’d start a large ban campaign to kill off foreign accounts posting stuff low quality politics memes like this just for money. This got push back as a bunch of big accounts claiming it would create false positive bans and they had legitimate interest in the topics despite not being American etc. I didn’t follow it closely after that but I believe it still led to some foreign accounts being banned, just not at the scale Nikita Bier wanted.

“Just ban them” is admittedly more complicated than it sounds once you think about it. Ie what about Canadians who post about American politics all the time. Or is it just low quality Indian accounts. How do you measure quality. Etc

They did.

On the other hand... on the internet, everybody is an American (or a Brit).

There are many people who don't live in a country where English is spoken natively, but who speak it well enough to lurk on the English internet. Those people are exposed to American and British politics and start to form opinions. It's not unusual for us to have our own takes on what happens in these countries.

But we don't pretend to be something we're not.

Is the solution that global wages are normalized?

I’m not an economist but it seems that a lot of things boil down to “X is cheaper in country A” or “Y is more costly in country B” creating arbitrage opportunities for players operating in grey area.

Again, I’m not an economist and am just speculating as a layman who understands math, but without wage normalization it seems the other option would be to only have per-country regulated social media. So Canadian social platforms are only accessible to users with Canadian IDs, US to US ID holders, and Indian ID holders can only access Indian social networks. And so on and so forth.. but then we become China.

It's pretty amazing corporate america was able to find a revenue scheme based on Russian disinformation campaigns, init.

It's more like astroturfing since forever, any mention of Americans doing disinformation instantly gets Russian bots brought up, like bro come on now.

ok, but making it a revenue strwam is the point, not whose message is doing what.

I mean I'm not sure it's a meme - this guy literally got rich doing it, to a point where he's selling "self guide" courses on how to do this:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...

People selling get rich guides did not get rich using the method they describe. But I don't doubt a lot of people try, with or without guides to help them.

Well I think both things can be true. I imagine he made a lot of money doing it, then eventually that well dried up for whatever reason, so he started selling courses (which are worthless because his method clearly doesn't work or he would just keep doing it)

Definitely a real thing, I meant it was a meme in the sense that at one point almost everyone was getting accused of being Indian (and subsequently having to refute it) in a partly humorous but also partly serious way

You know what? I ain't even mad. 300k is life-changing money in Sri Lanka.

Some highlights:

> The move made him a mint — and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.

> “I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he recalled.

> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.

The effort-to-profit ratio is so insane that you almost can't blame them for turning the internet into such toxic wasteland.

I was wondering how people monetised these things. Selling t-shirts and AI porn is not what I expected.

There's also the fact that the media and a large cadre of activists in the targeted countries already provide the 'democrat' standpoint which makes an AI simulacrum less noticeable as well as less appealing. I'd say that is a far more likely explanation than 'democrats know it is AI slop' which sounds a lot like wishful thinking by 'democrats'.

South Asia and africa. There's a reason he bought twitter and let any bozo buy verification. The money they make goes a long way in low income countries.

The same on Facebook, and its a very profitable:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...

Makes sense for the UK since if you post the same content as a citizen you could end up with the police at your door.

Not most of it - at least on Facebook where there is a LOT posted by people from South Asia and racist/extreme nationalist posters - far more than on Twitter the last time I compared my feeds. For one thing most of it on Facebook is dogwhistle racism not direct. A lot more does not meet the legal standards for creating records. Very little gets reported so no on investigates.

You "could" end up with police at your door, but even if reported most of these things do not meet the requirements for being recorded: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in...

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