Article by John Thornhill: “…Trump’s Maga movement has also found its natural home on social media, with many thousands of accounts amplifying his messages. That makes it all the more jarring to discover that some of the most active “America First” accounts are run from abroad.
In a move to secure “the integrity of the global town square”, the social media platform X last Friday began posting user location data. As a result, it emerged that dozens of influential Maga accounts are run out of foreign countries, including Russia, India and Nigeria.
For example, the MAGA NATION account, which claims to be a “Patriot Voice for We The People” with more than 393,000 followers, is based in eastern Europe (Non-EU), X revealed.
Malign foreign actors are known to use imposter accounts — either to manipulate political debate or to generate traffic and make money. That is just one of the ways in which our infosphere is being deliberately degraded.
There are three other types of social media deformities, too. Call them the four horsemen of the infocalypse. Unchecked, they will surely destroy our trust in almost anything we read online.
The second corrosive influence is how extremist views, once confined to the darker corners of the web, have seeped into mainstream debate, as documented by Julia Ebner, a researcher at Oxford university and author of Going Mainstream…(More)”
