Commentary
Enterprising individuals have learned that posting controversial content about another country’s politics is an easy way to make money, says Pusan National University’s Robert Kelly.
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08 Dec 2025 05:59AM (Updated: 08 Dec 2025 07:38AM)
BUSAN: A few weeks ago, X (formerly Twitter) changed its site’s code to reveal the country location of posters on the site.
X users quickly discovered that several popular pro-Trump accounts are based outside the United States, in countries such as Nigeria, India and Thailand.
X said that the feature is an “important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square”. Information researchers have long suspected that some of the platform’s prolific creators are foreigners posting about other countries’ politics and societies for profit. Some appear to work in systematic ways, such as through troll farms which employ bots alongside human workers.
In 2024, X changed its monetisation programme to reward creators based on how much engagement their content receives, rather than how many ads are delivered in the replies section. This has led to grifters posting outlandish takes on high-profile issues to attract views. Some also upload “rage bait” – content deliberately designed to infuriate readers and encourage them to respond.
All this interaction helps posts go viral, generating profits for the original posters. Enterprising individuals quickly learned that posting controversial content, while posing as nationals of wealthy countries with many X users, was an easy way to make money.
AMERICAN CONSPIRACISM
This phenomenon is most pronounced in the US, where political scientist Richard Hofstader identified a “paranoid style” in American politics decades ago. By 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter (and re-named it X), the site had matured and was widely used in politics and journalism.
US President Donald Trump had used Twitter for years as a platform to share his views, and many other pundits from his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement followed him onto the site.
Mr Trump has leaned heavily into conspiracy theories throughout his political career, first achieving notoriety with his false claim that former President Barack Obama is not a natural-born US citizen. Those around Mr Trump mimicked his style, leading to the conspiracism of conservative American social media over the last decade.
MAGA insists, for example, on spurious connections between childhood vaccinations and autism, and the alleged theft of the 2020 election by former President Joe Biden.
Into this fetid environment wandered the grifters whom Musk’s country-of-origin transparency has exposed. These profiteers quickly grasped that MAGA readers were primed for conspiratorial interpretations of current events.
MAGA pundits have relentlessly talked up the hidden forces of an American “deep state”, or a cabal of Democratic Party pedophiles around the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was easy for non-American posters to create accounts with American-appearing photos and content – and then earn money off the ensuing virality.
This has the terrible side-effect of worsening political polarisation, with the split between Republicans and Democrats growing deeper in the US.
A SWAMP OF DISINFORMATION
Where social media was once thought to be a liberating force enabling citizen journalists and expanding our pool of easily accessible information, it is now more akin to a swamp of disinformation.
Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk claimed that around 20 per cent of the platform’s users were bots. A study published in Nature in 2025 corroborates this figure. The rise of artificial intelligence portends even worse. Social media will likely be overrun with fake imagery and machine-generated text.
Old Twitter had a useful tool – the blue tick – to combat this. Users could not receive one unless they demonstrated some area expertise, usually reflected by published work or an advanced degree. This was a powerful filtering device. It allowed users to know that a poster claiming to be a doctor or physicist was in fact qualified to speak in those areas.
This changed when Mr Musk bought Twitter and moved to selling blue ticks instead. Mr Musk also eased the platform’s content controls, laying off employees in content moderation and relying more heavily on users and automated systems to flag harmful content.
The result has been a decline in the number of active users on X, and the movement of some users to alternatives, most notably Bluesky, founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
However, Bluesky’s 3.5 million daily users are still dwarfed by X’s 130 million daily users. X benefits enormously from first-mover and network benefits. Because Twitter was the first micro-blogging site, it accumulated a huge number of users, and that mass then acted as a draw for yet more users.
The sheer size of X acts as a magnet to retain otherwise disgruntled users, and is almost certainly why Mr Musk has not purged bots from the platform. They artificially inflate the user base and crowd out alternative platforms.
This may explain why X has only gone so far as to roll out transparency features, rather than to take more stringent action on flagged accounts. The site financially benefits from its large base, irrespective of whether they are bots, trolls or profiteering foreigners.
Mr Musk will not bring back the blue tick, and social media has become more toxic to open societies. For myself, I rarely use it now, and I do not recommend it to my students either. We are all better off reading serious information than doomscrolling fake news on our phones.
Robert Kelly is a professor of political science at Pusan National University. He writes a monthly column for CNA, published every second Monday.