X Marks the Spot: Seeing Generational Divides in Responses to X's Location Feature

'Today was one of the best days for this site since Elon Musk bought it. Really clarifying.' So claimed @EndWokeness to its almost 4 million followers in light of X's recent policy change to make public where accounts are based...or, more accurately, where they are probably based. The sentiment of the tweet mirrors many others released by everday users and popular political commentators alike, while almost every news outlet from News

week to The Rolling Stone has published articles dissecting the exposed metadata.

Throughout, there is a tone of shock and a strain of incredulity that so many accounts commenting on US politics and with profiles that imply a US-based user have been traced beyond US borders. To be honest, more than anything else, what has stunned me most about 'Locationgate' is actually how stunned these observers/commentators/journalists are. While the X profile policy is pitched as a method of increasing transparency vis-a-vis location, what it signals to me is just how out of touch -- culturally and technologically -- some commentators are when it comes to realities of the virtual world.

In the days since X toyed with the location feature, investigative journalists and so-called citizen journalists alike have taken it upon themselves to take note of which accounts stem from where. Like a true 21st century Rorscach test, people quickly took to bemoaning or mocking how accounts that promoted the opposition's ideology originated overseas. Trump supporters, Christian nationalist, and/or America Firsters, decried dangerous foreign influence, frequently citing accounts that X says come from much of the Global South, including Saudi Arabia, India, Kenya, and Bangladesh. Matt Walsh, for instance, devoted time in his Daily Wire show, as well as several tweets, to highlighting accounts critical of him (such as "Israel Exposed", which was ID'ed as being based in Saudi Arabia) or purporting to be pro-America First and yet based overseas. The End Wokeness account, as well as others such as Laura Loomer, Eitan Fischberger, and Catturd (to name only a few) all opted to post about accounts they viewed as foreign users aiming to subvert American political discourse. Meanwhile, several popular meme/political commentary accounts made light of how those pushing 'MAGA is Dead' messaging on X were foreign accounts, while others delve directly and offensively into racist tropes.

Meanwhile, those promoting progressive, liberal, and/or anti-MAGA Republican ideas have made light and fodder of the popularity and proliferation of purportedly foreign-run accounts promoting America First, Christian nationalist, and MAGA ideas and figures. For instance, @AntiTrumpCanada posted to its followers, 'Good morning to all the MAGA patriots working overtime in Nigeria, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Russia and Bangladesh. Nothing says "America First" like tweeting from six different continents,' a sentiment echoed time and again by accounts of varying sizes. Of particular interest to many were the seemingly verified accounts linked using the names of people connected to the current administration or even the account of federal agencies. To the last point, Homeland Security ultimately posted a tweet (now seen by more than 29 million users) that stated, 'I can’t believe we have to say this, but this account has only ever been run and operated from the United States. Screenshots are easy to forge, videos are easy to manipulate. Thank you for your attention to this matter.' In all, the whole thing is best articulated in the likes of the classic Spiderman meme, i.e. everyone pointing out the flaws of others just like them.

That the exposure of this aspect of account information has garnered this much outrage/attention/interest in the last week is, quite frankly, nothing short of headscratching, at least to me. Perhaps it is because I grew up on MTV's Catfish, learned how to make a Finsta by college, and have listened to the Dirty John podcast and 'Who tf did I marry' Tiktok saga, but what do you mean you are surprised that someone on the internet may not be who they seemed? Meanwhile, the Dead Internet Theory has been circulating for almost a decade now and more than two-thirds of Americans already knew what a bot account was, according to Pew, by 2018. My millenial may be showing, but I have always operated on the internet (and told my students to do likewise) using a Schrödinger's cat approach -- every stranger on the internet talking about themselves is a liar or a truth-teller, and we cannot ever really know which is true.

But more than that, all the outrage about the 'revelations' on the (foreign) origins of an X account makes me wonder how much commenters understand the Internet they are using. In a high-ranking member of X's own admission, X acknowledges that these geolocations are not perfect -- they claim it is 99.99% accurate (but again, you would have to take their word for it). Sure you clicked on the Account Information and saw countries such as 'Romania' or 'Iran' listed. Is that actually the case? Who knows. Do average commenters have any way of verifying this? No.

Further, for all the instances when a county is identified, there are many others in which X claims the region involved is 'South Asia' or 'North Africa,' so hardly a precise system. According to the BBC, moving or even temporarily visiting overseas may alter the geo-location X provides on the Account Information tab. This says nothing of the fact that some X accounts are clearly-group run, international in nature, and years old, so hardly something that can be pinned down to one spot easily. Add to all this what DHS noted is that people going online now posting screenshots of other accounts' Account Information tab can simply edit them to say whatever country fits the narrative.

More significantly, there is the issue of VPNs, essentially a mechanism by which a user can appear to be located elsewhere. In 2025, approximately 1.75 billion people have used VPNs while on the Internet. X's remedy for this in terms of their geo-location tab? Put a small exclamation point on the side, which when clicked says the information may not be accurate due to a VPN. With the level of skill now at the fingertips not only of everyday users who want to hide their locations using a basic, surface web marketed VPN but even moreso at the fingertips of skilled hackers/hacking collectives, the idea of being able to see and root out foreign accounts posing as US citizens is unrealistic.

With very little able to unify the factions of the Internet these days and so much distrust for all things AI, that so many X users look to this new feature as providing transparency and insight into "foreign" influences to US politics (isn't the whole pillar of X, nay social media, to facilitate idea sharing globally?) is eye opening. To be sure, if the information provided on these account tabs is accurate, it bespeaks immense international chatter, if not influence, on US politics from those outside US borders. However, the extent to which that is news to some or the level of reliability placed on the earnestness of social media users tells another story. That is, although those of us on X are all using the same platform, we are not using it in the same ways. The new feature has allowed some to feel more aware of what seems to be a "foreign"/"domestic" divide. For me and others like me, the split feels more generational, or perhaps constructed along the lines of the chronically online and the casual user, and differences in how we approach information online is what actually makes so many X users feel foreign to me.