X’s long-awaited and much-discussed location feature has arrived, and as seems to be inexorably the case these days, it is already making the platform less usable, with screenshots of users’ locations filling this writer’s newsfeed as though they’re the single most important thing we have to say about one another.
For those blessedly unaware of what I’m talking about, Elon Musk’s X launched a new transparency feature over the weekend, which allows users to see which country or region an account is based in, alongside some other information like when the account was created and how often the username has been changed.
Prior to the feature’s launch, users were already engaging en-masse in guessing games as to where some of the platform’s most prominent accounts were based, with frequent ‘tells’ achieving widespread recognition – such as repeatedly poor grammar from accounts that purported to be from English-speaking countries, and preferential treatment for countries in international rankings that seemed suspect to observers.
A good, and funny, example of this was when anonymous Based Tradition accounts, or something to that effect, would pause their regular pro-West programming to post something about what an awful country Pakistan is, leading users to suspect that the person behind the account was, in fact, Indian, given the historical animosity between those peoples.
So with interest in the provenance of X accounts at an all-time high, the stage was set for a tool that would take the guessing right out of it and instead serve up user information on a platter.
As you might expect, many X users have taken to it like fish to water. The pros, then, before we get to the, in my opinion, overriding cons.
Many accounts that post primarily about the politics of one country – the US, for example – have been revealed to be based in an entirely different part of the globe, whether that be Latin America, Europe, Africa or southeast Asia. This is all the more interesting when said accounts are giving the impression that they’re based in the US, or whichever country they may have an obsession with.
Accounts primarily interested with international conflicts, too, have fallen afoul of the great revelation, with many pro-Ukraine accounts, many pro-Russia accounts, many pro-Israel accounts and many pro-Palestine accounts, apparently, based anywhere but the countries they’re supporting.
That is not, of course, illegal, but it is interesting all the same.
Media outlets, NGOs, political parties, prominent personalities and every other account type you can think of have had questions asked of them as a result of the locations attached to their accounts by the new feature, no small number of aspersions being cast in the process.
All of which is very interesting. But that’s about all that can be said in its favour, because much of it is untrue, or misleading at the very least, upon further examination, and much more of it is outright nasty, whatever way you read it. While X had every right to roll out this feature, in doing so, it has generated a little light, and a lot of heat.
The most obvious thing to take issue with is the disclaimer the location feature comes with, which essentially nullifies whatever usefulness it has straight off the bat. “The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation,” an information note reads, adding “This data may not be accurate and can change periodically”.
A prime example of this is the Gript account, which for who knows what reason, is described as being based in the United Kingdom, despite being based in Ireland. It hasn’t stopped conspiratorially-minded social media users, though, from speculating that pulling the strings behind the Gript operation is none other than Nigel Farage, among others, who apparently takes his orders from our true paymasters, the US or Russia, depending on who you ask.
On a much higher level, the US Department of Homeland Security has also been “outed” as an Israeli operation, after edited screenshots went around purporting to show the account as being based in Israel. That the possibility of convincingly editing screenshots and clips didn’t occur to X’s programmers is something (or it did, and they decided the transparency reward was worth the risk), but now social media users have to live with the misleading consequences.
Closer to home once again, much ado is being made of the Sinn Féin account being based in the “United Kingdom,” as though there’s anything strange about the fact that a party operating in both the North and the Republic might be run by its admins in both the North and, presumably, the Republic. That is assuming its designated location is even correct, which is no sure thing.
I could go on on the point of the new feature’s accuracy, but still more detrimental, in this writer’s opinion, is the way account location is already being cited as some kind of be-all, end-all argument, or as some kind of stick with which to beat people using X in completely innocent ways.
One of the worst examples of this that I’ve seen so far concerns the account ‘Holy Bible’, which innocuously posts Bible passages and, admittedly, kitschy devotional messages and images daily. Nevertheless, since the new feature went live and ‘revealed’ it as being based in India (its admin never tried to hide this fact), it has received a good deal of abuse for…nothing other than being Indian.
As though St Thomas the Apostle himself didn’t carry the Gospel over there in the first century.
Additionally, while social media arguments are generally speaking less than edifying – there are some exceptions to that rule – since the new feature went live, a new low-quality form of dialogue has taken centre stage: citing account locations back and forth at one another. It is some of the most slop-ish behaviour I’ve seen on social media so far, if we characterise ‘slop’ as being the least enlightening or cultured content humans have ever produced. Like outlandish AI images and videos, and other soul-destroying things of that nature.
The few patchy merits the location feature has are entirely outweighed by the effect it’s already having on the discourse. While I expect the location craze to die down fairly quickly, it won’t go away, but rather will once again subtly transform the way people interact with one another on the internet. Location will become more important than substance, if it hasn’t already, and who you are (or who people suspect you are) more important than what you say.