On Friday, X debuted its About This Account feature globally in a rollout that descended into chaos over the feature’s accidental uncovering of foreign actors behind popular right-wing accounts that actively share news on US politics. X users can now see the date an account joined the platform, how many times it has changed its username, and most importantly, the country or region it’s based in. The move, according to X head of product Nikita Bier, “is an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.” But the feature has had an unintended consequence: it revealed that big pro-Trump accounts like @MAGANationX, a right-wing user with nearly 400,000 followers that regularly shares news about US politics, aren't actually based in the US. MAGANationX, for example, is based in Eastern Europe, according to X. One of Elon Musk’s promises during the takeover of Twitter was to purge the platform of inauthentic accounts. But several studies have shown that suspected inauthentic activity has remained at about the same levels. X has long struggled with troll farms spreading misinformation, boosted by its tendency to monetarily reward engagement. There's also an irony in the fact that revealing the origins of ragebait-posting political accounts like these was once the subject of groundbreaking research by the Stanford Internet Observatory and other academic researchers. But the effort outraged Republicans, which then sued them over their contacts with the government about information operations like these and largely succeeded in stopping the work. #Digital Wellness 📱🧘 nytimes.com/2025/11/24/us..