X rolled out its "About This Account" feature yesterday, displaying users' account creation and "based in" countries. The launch immediately went sideways when the data proved wildly inaccurate, forcing the company to pull key information within 24 hours. Instead of recognizing the obvious technical issues, users spent the day weaponizing the flawed data to attack political opponents as "foreign operatives."
X just learned the hard way that rushing transparency features into production can create more problems than they solve. The platform's head of product Nikita Bier announced the "About This Account" rollout yesterday, promising to show users which countries accounts were created from and where they're currently "based." He acknowledged there were "a few rough edges" but assured users they'd be fixed by Tuesday.
Those rough edges turned into a full-blown crater. Within hours, complaints poured in about completely wrong location data. The inaccuracies were so widespread that X was forced to remove the account creation location feature entirely, with Bier admitting the data "was not 100 percent" accurate, especially for older accounts.
The technical explanation is straightforward - VPN usage, IP address changes, international travel, and legacy data all contributed to the mess. At the time of reporting, popular YouTuber Hank Green's account was listed as being based in Japan, UK music publication MusicTech appeared to be US-based, and Massachusetts audio company AVID was somehow located in Spain.
But rather than recognizing an obvious data quality issue, X users immediately turned the feature into a political weapon. The platform erupted with accusations that accounts with different viewpoints were actually foreign operatives running psychological operations. The irony was thick - even users who publicly complained about their own profiles showing incorrect locations continued making bad-faith posts about opponents being foreign agents.
This isn't entirely without merit. Foreign influence operations on social media are a documented reality, with conducting systematic targeting American politics for years. Many rage-bait accounts genuinely aren't US-based, operating as part of both disinformation efforts and engagement-farming schemes designed to monetize political controversy.
