X’s New “Location” Feature Just Nuked Thousands of Foreign Troll Accounts – And Nobody Saw It Coming
In what might be the most unintentionally brutal transparency update in social-media history, Elon Musk’s X platform quietly rolled out a change late Sunday night that is currently setting the entire troll-farm industry on fire.
The update?
A tiny line added to every user’s “About This Account” page: Current location: [City, Country] – updated in real time.
That’s it. No announcement, no blog post, no Elon tweet. Just a silent deployment around 22:00 UTC on November 24.
Within hours, the internet exploded with screenshots of “patriotic American” accounts suddenly confessing – without meaning to – that they were posting from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tehran, Shenzhen, and a suspiciously large number of IP addresses in Nigeria and Bangladesh.
The Bloodbath Was Immediate
The infamous @RealAmericanPatriot1776 account (312 k followers, always online 24/7, exclusively posts MAGA memes and Tesla FUD) → Current location: Samara, Russia
@ConcernedMom4Truth (known for anti-vaccine threads and Cybertruck explosion conspiracies) → Current location: Qom, Iran
A network of 147 accounts that spent the last six months calling Starship “a taxpayer-funded fireworks show” → All currently in a single office building in Haidian District, Beijing
By Monday morning, independent researchers using the new feature had already identified and archived more than 8,400 accounts that now show foreign locations while still using American flags, eagle PFPs, and “#UltraMAGA” in their bios.
Elon Has Not Commented Yet
But X’s head of engineering posted at 03:14 AM UTC: “We said we would increase transparency. This is transparency.”
Why This Is a Bigger Deal Than It Looks
It’s self-executing. No need for fact-checkers, community notes, or lengthy investigations. The platform is now ratting out its own bad actors in real time.
It completely breaks the economic model of troll farms. Previously, these operations could buy aged US-based accounts or route through residential proxies. The new field appears to pull from device GPS + IP geolocation and updates every few minutes. VPNs don’t hide it.
It’s retroactive. Every account on the platform (yes, including yours) now shows a live location. There is no opt-out.
The Best Reveals So Far (as of 09:00 UTC Nov 25)
A verified “Blue Check” account with 1.1 million followers that spent years attacking Tesla’s Full Self-Driving → Current location: Belgrade, Serbia
The account that started the “Cybertruck frames are snapping in half” hoax last month → Current location: Lagos, Nigeria
A pro-Russian account masquerading as a Texas rancher (complete with cowboy hat PFP and “y’all”) → Current location: Crimea, Russia (yes, X is displaying “Crimea, Russia”)
Fallout & Reactions
Stock-short sellers who relied on coordinated X campaigns to move TSLA are reportedly in full meltdown in private Discords.
At least 200 accounts linked to the 2024 election-interference networks have gone private or deleted in the last eight hours.
Grok started answering “Where is this user located?” queries with the real-time data, creating a feedback loop of exposure.
Politicians on both sides are suddenly very quiet about “free speech absolutism.”
What Happens Next?
Sources tells that the location field is only Phase 1. Phase 2 (rumored to drop before December) will reportedly add “Account primarily operated from” with a 30-day history graph. If that lands, the remaining professional disinformation networks will effectively be finished on the platform.
For now, the timeline has never been cleaner – or more surreal. People are posting screenshots the way they once posted ratio screenshots. It’s Christmas morning for OSINT researchers and an extinction-level event for paid influencers who forgot to buy a VPN in-country SIM card. Welcome to the new X: same chaos, but now with receipts.
Stay tuned. This one is moving faster than a Starship hot-stage separation.
Share your thoughts with us on X, and don’t forget to follow us for more updates on Elon Musk’s visionary future.