Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: X
“The Aura of President Donald Trump is unimaginable. Love him or hate him, no one remains unmoved in his presence,” wrote the X account @TRUMP_ARMY_ earlier this month. For the account, which has more than 500,000 followers, this sort of fawning message is pretty typical. Two days earlier, the account reposted, “The President puts America First over his own financial gains. 🔥🔥” Another post reads, “Drop a ❤️, if you Love President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump!!”
GOD BLESS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!! pic.twitter.com/JtX8A2bLQj
— FAN TRUMP ARMY (@TRUMP_ARMY_) November 19, 2025
On November 22, the president’s Truth Social profile shared a screenshot of a post from the account, and it wasn’t the first time. That same day, X’s head of product gave some news. “In a couple hours, we’ll be rolling out About This Account globally, allowing you to see the country or region where an account is based,” he said, calling it an “important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.” And so @TRUMP_ARMY_, along with countless other hyperpartisan X accounts, was suddenly exposed: This America Firster was posting from India.
Hey MAGA fans, did you know many of the MAGA users on X are actually from a foreign country?X had to turn off its location feature within hours because thousands of prominent and “verified” MAGA accounts turned out to be foreign. pic.twitter.com/zJwSJFAjN3
— Dean Booth 🦆 🐇 (@BoothDean) November 23, 2025
X’s language about “integrity” anticipated some of the more straight-faced responses to the feature’s revelations. “I have long said foreign actors are using social media to poison our politics and divide Americans,” wrote former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, calling the feature a “win” for American security. Hers is a common and familiar institutional perspective: Social platforms, with their large concentrations of American users and weak forms of identification, are a perfect conduit for foreign political manipulation. You might remember that this was a major concern as liberals reached for explanations after Trump’s first election. A postelection New Yorker check-in with then-President Barack Obama revealed that he had been talking “almost obsessively” about a BuzzFeed story describing pro-Trump content farms based in Macedonia, preceding a yearslong obsession with “fake news” and its effect on the electorate.
The 2016 theory of foreign manipulation on social media centered on Facebook, which was near the peak of its influence as a news platform and where it was difficult to tell what other people were seeing. This was the era of Russian troll farms, anonymous Facebook news accounts, and general worries about the scourge of “disinformation.” The phenomenon was real, although empirical attempts to figure out how much foreign “fake news” mattered haven’t reached many conclusions. It was also, in hindsight, a period of elite anxiety about loss of control, most recently repeated in the response to TikTok, which, after years of attempted regulation and ban threats, is somewhere in the middle of a politically motivated forced sale. In that circumstance, too, there was something to the story: TikTok did have deep ties to the Chinese government, which influenced the platform’s rules. But like Facebook in 2016, it provided critics with tempting, too-neat explanations for sudden swings in public opinion, such as the surge in youth support for Palestinians.
In 2025, X is neither old Facebook nor new TikTok. While it’s conspicuously different from pre–Elon Musk Twitter in a lot of ways, it’s held on to a few core characteristics. Despite leaning into TikTok-style algo slop, X is still a place where you can see what other people are talking about. Twitter always struggled as a mass-market platform, and X struggles as least as much. And while X’s cultural and political character has been, err, adjusted over the last couple of years, it remains, at its heart, a platform for elite performance and coordination, only now for different groups of elites.
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform’s memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn’t be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
Sign of low testosterone:You hate someone because of their location.
— TheManMaker (@TheManMakerx) November 24, 2025
Of course, now, as previously, that’s mostly not what’s going on. X’s foreign MAGA ecosystem is more spam than scheme, and on Musk’s reoriented and remonetized platform, going MAGA is one of the easiest ways to make a buck. As Jason Koebler at 404 Media writes, America’s polarization has become the world’s side hustle:
Inauthentic viral accounts on X are just the tip of the iceberg, though … A huge amount of the viral content about American politics and American news on social media is from sock puppet and bot accounts monetized by people in other countries. The rise of easy to use, free AI generative tools have supercharged this effort, and social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame. The current disinformation and slop phenomenon on the internet today makes the days of ‘Russian bot farms’ and ‘fake news pages from Cyprus’ seem quaint; the problem is now fully decentralized and distributed across the world and is almost entirely funded by social media companies themselves.
In talking with hyperpartisan Facebook-page operators in 2016, this emerging dynamic was already pretty clear: Among the many ways to skim cash from the big platforms, throwing in with Trumpism was a good business plan, and that remains true. On Facebook then and on X today, ideologically motivated foreign actors or state-sponsored posters probably aren’t meaningfully skewing the political discourse one way or another. Instead, platform politics — and, increasingly, American politics in general — are just downstream from spam.
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