I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
Yes and no. It also shows which app store country the account is tied to, and that my friend is a little bit more work. It also shows an icon when it suspects VPN. A lot of these foreign run accounts are in fact not using VPN and their host country matches their app store country. Lots of "e-girl" type of accounts are foreign owned, and there's an insane number of racist accounts LARPing as American run from places like Turkey, and other countries. I think my favorite call out was some Canadian account that nobody realized was Canadian. I think if you're going to inject yourself in the politics of other countries your audience deserves to know if you're not even living there.
You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
It points out when they are not using the app, and if they suspect a VPN. I saw one screenshot where it said "Desktop Browser" or something to that effect.
Country of origin is based on IP. Many British accounts are using VPNs due to the online safety act and this is noted by X. X also shows the country of the app store the app was downloaded from which is more accurate.
Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
It’s ironic but also completely typical.
Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
It seems a little self evident? A heroin addict might say they love it and never want to quit, at the same time say it's harmful, should be banned and nobody should ever try it.
Your analogy is equating homosexuality to heroin addiction. Was this intentional?
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Okay, I came across another video talking about Roblox and it's pedo problems, and I think that's problematic. And I might talk about that if the topic goes toward "problematic things that are currently on my mind".
And with that statement you ironically insinuate that I'm a pedo
You're not the first person that made that argument (that the people talking about a problem actually are the real perps!), but from my perspective it feels more like an easy way to make it socially unacceptable to talk about categories of issues. Which is likely intended by the person making this argument, likely because... You see were this is going?
Parent said "many" and didn't in any way insinuate it's an implication you can run the other way.
>Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.
Sounds like how Congress exempts themselves from many of the laws they pass.
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
How do you know this as a fact?
I'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
Interesting. Maybe gps location data snapshots factor into it. You could probably defeat that with app permissions though. GPS spoofing is also possible, but a lot more friction for troll accounts.
Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.
I was thinking about it a bit more this morning, in Costa Rica I used a local sim from a local carrier, but since then I've been traveling but using esims from Airalo, they still use a local carrier, but I wonder if it's kinda like how the 2 factor auth stuff often won't let you use a VOIP/twilio number it needs to be from a real carrier, I wonder if x has a matrix of signals they use to decide to switch it or not, and within the carrier metric, esim re-seller is deprioritized over a real telco or something? Who knows, but it's kinda fun to think about! :)
X shows a "LOCK" icon when they are coming in VPN. To out them. Also, it shows which country's app store you installed your app. For this reason, when they use their mobile app, it will be outted that way.
Lock means the account is private, not that it's using a VPN.
It's not via IP address. I created my account using a US data center IP back in 2022 from Malaysia. I am now in the UK, using a Swiss VPN IP. My location shows up as Japan...
I would suspect they are deducing country of origin via ad targeting, which is far more precise than just geolocating IP addresses.
Are Azure VMs different to a VPN? Sorry I'm not the most technical.
Reason I ask is because there are few people I follow that use VPNs but their location is accurate on X.
Also, X also shows where you downloaded the app from, e.g. [Country] App Store, so that one might be a bit more difficult to get around.
It was a bad example as it's quite easy to detect cloud operator endpoints (their internet gateway). Try it sometime and see how many web site make you go through some captcha maze.
They would most likely use residential proxy/vpns that show your traffic coming out of a regular household ISP. They can be purchased for cheap.
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
You can but a lot of people use their phone and the official apps. It also shows if you primarily use a browser. :)
It looks like this shows where each account was originally created from. So new accounts can get around it, but all existing accounts that didn't have the foresight to be using a VPN from the start are now burned.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
App Store country of origin too weighs in.
Google thinks my account is American for Play Store geo limiting purposes, and if I recall correctly would only let me update it by adding a payment card, which I refuse to do. I don’t know where they even got that idea—they should have known full well I was Australian. My best guess is that for a few years I used a phone I bought while visiting America. But it was neither my first phone nor my most recent, and the account was at least five years old before I even visited the US.
You also need a phone number tied to your twitter account.
You do? I don't.
Residential VPNs are already so cheap.
Exactly how anyone still scraping Twitter does it. Dirt cheap. Same with accounts to use to get around api limits.
Blocking datacenter IPs it is then.
Or identify them as using a datacenter IP.
No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.
No, it's live.