Throwing a messy X around this calculation caused a huge mess

Yesterday X started rolling out a new product About this account feature, which included the country the account was created from and the country the account was “located” in (which is different from “online via”). CompanySome rough edges“, but they promised to solve it by Tuesday.

Users’ reaction to X was, of course, completely Head level. They immediately realized the data was flawed and certainly had not spent the last 24 hours trying to score Political points.

The people at Foreign clients. Even users who publicly complained that information on their profiles was inaccurate continued to complain Posts are in bad faith About how to manage their political opponents foreign psyop.

Inaccurate data can have several reasons. People who travel, or outlets with staff spread across the globe, may appear to be “residing” somewhere other than where they are actually located, at least temporarily. If someone is using a VPN, this may affect where their location appears. Some of them could just be old IP addresses. At the time of writing these lines, Hank Green account It is listed as based in Japan, Music Tech (UK sister publication NME) is shown as being based in the United States, and AVID (Massachusetts-based ProTools maker) is listed as being based in Spain.

Of course, there is also a grain of truth in some of this. Many political outrage accounts are not based in the United States. We’ve known for a long time that Dwarf Farms was on a campaign foreign impact campaign On American politics. But some of them are also a financial planner. Monetizing X depends largely on correlationNothing gets people engaged like getting angry about politics.