Fake Social

De
Dan Perry
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What X’s new transparency revealed is basically an international emergency: Social media is not serious enough to be taken as seriously as we do. Rethink “trending.”

When X quietly rolled out its new country-of-origin transparency tool, it did not intend to detonate the ecosystem. It was rare high ground for Elon Musk’s beleaguered ex-Twitter, which seemingly recognized a need to ferret out the bots that increasingly account for traffic. But what it revealed was dynamite.

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The first surprises involved accounts claiming to be eyewitnesses from Gaza, which the tool exposed as being operated from very far away. Clearly they were part of an anti-Israel global influence operation — no huge surprise there.

But the real bombshell was this: Many accounts presenting themselves as US-based “MAGA” voices actually trace back to foreign locations. Accounts presenting themselves as American or European political commentators — some large enough to shape opinion and influence news cycles — were shown to be run from Nigeria, India, Serbia, Pakistan, the Gulf, Eastern Europe and beyond.

For instance, one account called MAGANationX — described as a “Patriot Voice for We The People” — was shown as operated from Eastern Europe, despite claiming US origins, and is reported to have nearly 400,000 followers. Another handle, IvankaNews, an Ivanka Trump–oriented fan-account with about 1 million followers, was flagged as being based in Nigeria. Smaller examples include MAGA Scope (with some 51,000+ followers) operating out of Nigeria and Dark Maga (~15,000 followers) showing as based in Thailand.

These cases suggest a pattern: accounts that participate in US political discourse under “America-first” branding — which has elevated Trump and caused irreperable harm to the cohesion of the Western alliance — are based abroad. The scale is still being mapped, but even this handful raises serious questions about platform transparency, identity, and influence.

(It must be noted that the location tool seems to not be fool-proof. Factors such as VPNs, shared networks, or global team postings mean flagged locations may not always indicate malicious foreign control. The tool shows “country of origin” as best-available data, not definitive proof of operatives or funding links. But even with those limitations, the public visibility of so many analytics-worthy accounts raises the possibility that large swathes of the “noise” may originate off-shore.)

What had seemed like scattered cases snapped suddenly into focus as something far larger: an organized ecosystem of fabricated personas infiltrating every corner of public discourse. What this feature exposed is not an isolated scandal but the culmination of a decade-long drift into unreality. The social internet we thought we were using — a chaotic but authentic marketplace of human voices — has been eclipsed by a synthetic sphere where identity is fluid, origin is obscured, sentiment can be purchased, and virality is a commodity. To riff on Trump’s own ironically-named social platform, it’s clear we’re in the age of fake social.

In a way, the issue was well known. Studies show that humans now account for only about half of the web traffic, which is obviously absurd. AI chatbots scraping the globe’s websites will only drive the figure down. A startup I’ve mentioned before, Spread, has based its value proposition on content that is disseminated by provable humans only — since that is now scarcity with value.

So the people we argue with online may not be people at all. The movements that seem to erupt out of nowhere may not represent any real constituency. The “eyewitness account” that garners millions of views may have been manufactured by someone who has never left their apartment. The algorithm cannot tell the difference — and increasingly, neither can we. And these algorithms — which should be regulated and scrutinized — at present reward emotional intensity, political extremism and outrage. Authenticity is slow, uncertain, and expensive. Fakery is frictionless and infinitely scalable. So the system tilts toward the unreal.

 

A Mirage of Public Mood

So we must upend our assumptions. For years, “trending topics” have been treated as a kind of civic thermometer — a measure of what the public is feeling. Perhaps even better than a poll — so dynamic, so very modern. Journalists, politicians, advertisers, activists, diplomats all calibrate to these signals.

But if accounts are misrepresenting their identities, amplification can be purchased through engagement farms in Pakistan and Vietnam, and bots can push a narrative, then “trending” measures not sentiment but manipulation.

A spike in hashtags might indicate a genuine groundswell — or a well-coordinated operation executed with 200 cheap smartphones and 5,000 prepaid SIM cards. Without transparency, both look identical. So we may have been building policy governments and media strategies and campaigns and assumptions around signals that may not reflect reality at all.

The democratic compass has been demagnetized. And the fact that much of it is obviously transnational interference operations makes it more interesting still.

Exactly one year ago, Romania became one of the clearest demonstrations of Putin’s election-interference machine. A previously obscure far-right, pro-Kremlin candidate — Calin Georgescu — suddenly vaulted to first place in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, thanks to a Kremlin-funded bot and TikTok surge involving thousands of accounts and tens of millions of impressions. The operation was textbook Putin: elevate an anti-EU, anti-NATO, conspiracy-peddling figure in a country that serves as the front-line logistical artery for Ukraine. And just months ago, Moscow attempted a carbon-copy version in Moldova, flooding social platforms with fake outrage, fabricated “local voices,” and coordinated botnets aimed at weakening the pro-Western government and nudging the country back toward Russia’s orbit (it barely failed).

But Romania did something no Western democracy has dared: it pushed back — immediately, institutionally, and successfully. Romanian intelligence traced the interference, exposed the networks, and pressed the issue into the courts. The Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the tainted first round stands as a global first: a democracy refusing to accept an election distorted by Putin’s machinery. And by helping Moldova identify and dismantle parallel bot operations, Romania signaled that Russian hybrid warfare can be stopped not through wishful warnings or post-mortem reports, but through active, unapologetic intervention before the damage becomes irreversible.

Yes: Foreign actors now understand that social media is the cheapest and most effective vector for destabilization. Influence operations target elections and referendums and try to compel policy about immigration, public health, and war. The objective is to cause free societies harm. Dictatorships, remember, don’t have to worry nearly so much about public opinion. And because fake social blends seamlessly into real discourse, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish. Democracies respond to phantom public pressure. Politicians chase shadows. Journalists amplify illusions. Citizens despair at divisions their enemies have engineered. Democracy breaks down if we cannot perceive ourselves accurately.

The Regulatory Imperative

The answer just cannot be “media literacy” or “be careful.” The scale of fake social has outpaced individual vigilance. Social platforms are now critical democratic infrastructure — as essential as utilities and as dangerous when unregulated. And yet they operate with fewer obligations than a community radio station. We do not need censorship or government control of content. What we need is the digital equivalent of food-safety rules: a baseline expectation of transparency and accountability.

At minimum:

  • platforms should disclose where political accounts are operated
  • anonymous accounts should not be able to achieve mass political reach
  • major virality waves must be independently auditable
  • synthetic media and automated personas should be labeled clearly
  • the algorithms should be transparent, so that is Fake Social is pushing anger and division for profit, this should be understood and considered

The revelation triggered by X’s transparency feature should force a reckoning. It revealed how deeply we have drifted into an information environment where the distinction between real and unreal has been eroded to the point of absurdity.

But there is good news here as well: The berserk emotional texture of the internet — the sense that everything is angrier, that each debate is now a brawl — is not solely the product of human behavior. It is amplified and sculpted by networks of accounts that never get tired, never step back and are engineered for abrasion. The exhaustion people feel after hours of scrolling comes from the feeling that humanity has lost its mind. It turns out, however, that this is not exactly true.

 

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