Bulwark Takes - Turns Out America First Lives in... Bangladesh?!

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Sommer take on X/Twitter's new geolocation feature and the weekend chaos it caused. MAGA accounts that claimed to be all-American turned out to be from places like Bangladesh, Nigeria, India, and Serbia, sparking a major debate about why political discourse has become so toxic online. Read more from Will's False Flag newsletter: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/new-x-twitter-games-location-geolocation-about-right-wing-groypers

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newsletter which you should be getting in your inbox twice a week when you get it that's up to will sometimes he falls in time and sometimes he doesn't let's see oh don't laugh well you know it's true well i like to keep everyone guessing mostly me uh we're here to talk about his latest edition which honestly was so great because uh i was living it over the weekend It is the new geolocation feature on X, formerly known as Twitter, and it's set off an incredible amount of comedic relief, I would say, and a little bit of, you know, I don't know, laughing and pointing at a bunch of accounts that were exposed to be foreign accounts, pretending to be American accounts.

Before we get into it, subscribe to the feed. We get great stuff like this. All right, well, before we start at like all. all the people who were mocking everyone and pointing it out and all the infighting that's ensued. Do you know why Twitter made this change where you can now look up the country of origin from the poster? Yeah, I mean, so there's this Twitter executive or ex-executive Nikita Beer who had kind of been talking about how they were going to do this for a few weeks. I think there is this idea that Twitter has been overrun by AI often slop, just kind of general kind of like stuff that is meant to get engagement, but it really has no value to it. And obviously, that's because Elon Musk put in this thing where you get payouts based on the engagement you get.

And I think economically, at least the theory is that I think for someone in a more developed country, it doesn't really, you don't make that much money. It doesn't make that much sense to just be sitting around doing this. But people in other countries, the money goes further. Yeah, I mean, that's spoken like a man who doesn't get a lot of engagement. True, true. I don't know what your payouts are looking like. For the record, I've not taken advantage of the payout system. Maybe I should.

My tweets are not so bad. I get a lot of people dunking. I mean, that counts as an engagement, right? Well, you might as well get paid for it at that point. Yeah, I'm just imulating myself online for free. So you have these accounts that I think were long suspected to be kind of posing as Americans to generate money and kind of dabbling in American politics. And so then Twitter added this feature where you can see the country a user is posting from. And it went off like a bomb on the wrong.

Right, and it caused a lot of trouble. Yeah, was there any, like, was there any, you know, warning that this was going to be applied to just randomly show up one morning, like Saturday and we're like, oh, my God, this dude's from Bangladesh. Yeah, there had been talk that they were going to add the feature in sort of the coming days, and then they added it permanently last weekend. Okay. So, like, I wake up, a lot of people are doing, like, the whole screen grab being like, you know, American Patriot 24 is actually from Serbia and look at this. and this griper is from like, you know, Estonia and it's just like nonstop. And then it went like dark for a little bit, like the feature went off, but then went back online.

But can you just sort of summarize like the sort of big picture takeaway of what happened on Saturday and Sunday? Yeah, I mean, I think the revelations were really that a lot of these kind of these engagement bait accounts that are posting either sort of controversial takes to get people to engage with them or that are just kind of like maga slop accounts that are posting you know like a picture it's like retweet if you're a real trumper and a picture of your own letter or that those were you know based in Bangladesh or or Pakistan and then the kind of the political valence really turned out to be that as you mentioned a lot of the Groyper accounts the white nationalist following nick

Fuentes a lot of them were revealed to be a foreign as well and so there was this you know we talked a lot here about this kind of maga civil war that's going on this fighting between Nick Fuentes, people like Candice Owens on one hand, Tucker Carlson, and people like Ben Shapiro, sort of more mainline Republicans on the other. And so for this kind of mainline crew, they said, wait a minute, is Nick Fuentes is following? Is that all astroturfed? Is that just guys in Pakistan? You know, maybe it was all fake. Well, is it?

Well, I don't think so. I mean, I think a lot of people there. I know. I wanted the grippers to be fake as well. But I think, you know, a lot of the accounts, people would make these graphics, and they would say, oh, like, kebab remover, Groyper is fake. He's Serbian. And on one hand, it's like, well, yeah, I mean, he's, he had a Serbian flag. He talked about being Serbian. I think he had a Slobodon Milosevic Groyper.

So, yeah, I mean, we could have predicted this. Who doesn't? Well, I mean, well, that's pretty such a common Groyper. But, you know, it also, I guess on one hand is just sort of like also shows you how American politics and culture war has really infected the way. world. There was a nurse named Red Pill nurse who's always going on about how the 2020 election was stolen. And she turned out to be Belgian. And she says, well, look, yeah, I'm Belgian, but I'm also like a MAGA, the MAGA anti-vax nurse. Yeah, there's something to that where it's like, okay, these grippers are these groupers are, these group accounts are Serbian. They're still

getting tons of engagement. Like, people are still attracted to it. But, you know, then again, I want to just go through a couple of the ones that kind of caught our attention over the weekend. And there was the America First account, America underscore First O, based in Bangladesh. I mean, that's just pretty misleading. Like, if you're going to be America first, you know, maybe be American. Magination X was based in Eastern Europe, non-EU, Eastern Europe. You know, maybe not Magination. Make America Grating.

I guess he can apply to Eastern Europe. I don't know. There was an Ivanka Trump fan account that was based in Nigeria. I guess you can be an Ivanka Trump fan in Nigeria, but all that posting about how great Ivanka is, it kind of comes in a little differently when you know it's a Nigerian doing it.

Doge designer. That one's a pretty popular one. That was based in India. So it's like, you know, I guess to me there is some significance to it. It's like these people are trying to fuck with us a little bit. Yeah, maybe they're into American politics, but they don't have

the same skin in the game, right? Yeah, I think that's fair and I mean I think it also helps explain at least somewhat the kind of like deranged atmosphere on X you know in the past since Elon Musk took over where it just feels like every every time you open it and particularly if you do the algorithmic feed like I do to get the really crazy stuff oh my god are you algorithmic oh always of course that's how I get like just like full face right into I don't even know I can't even imagine well you know I would love to live in your algorithm for like half a day and experience that's how I find the good stuff yeah

Yeah, no, that's true. So what is like, what's, what are your, what are your, what, like, what's your algorithm prioritizing for you right now? Like, what, is it just like, pure. Definitely anything about the kind of Ryan Lizza, Olivia Nuzzi's story. I mean, that's a big one. But, you know, also just like, like, like, real bag of Civil War stuff, I would say, because, you know, I look so much into it.

I mean, I think I would also add here that, you know, we're talking about the different factions that were maybe four on Astroterter. The, the manosphere has been very hard hit here. Like, if there's a picture of a guy. like smoking a cigar and saying, you know, like don't let women hold you back from accumulating capital. Like that is probably a guy in India. I think we found out.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, no, I will say over the weekend when this stuff was blown up, I did change to the 4U recommendation. It was kind of ironic because it was just filled with people surfacing these screenshots of the country of origin. It's like the 4U algorithm is recommending a bunch of tweets showing how fake

this platform actually is. It's like sort of self-destructive in a way. But the other part of this, in the irony that you noted in the newsletter, is that a lot of these people who complained about liberal hysteria over Russian election interference, now we're having to sort of come around and be like hysterical themselves about foreign bot interference in conservative politics. Yeah, I mean, you know, we look back at 2016 and these are the same people who were saying, you know, the right in general, was saying, you know, the right in general was saying, you know, this Russian bot thing is not real.

Democrats are just kind of trying to blame foreign influence for Trump. But then you have people like Matt Walsh, who's saying, you know, foreigners are, you know, meddling in our elections, our conversations about politics. You have Joel Pollock at Breitbart, who just went out and said, we need a national security investigation of the bots. And then it gets even fun. Come on. Yeah.

Investigation of the bond. We got to catch, you know, based groiper. we got to get Josie Gabbard on the case. Okay, and then you're going on, sorry. Well, I was going to say, I mean, including people like Dave Rubin, who's a podcaster and was also saying, you know, this is foreign meddling.

And of course, there's some irony here because a lot of the people, at least several of them, now complaining about the bot problem, were themselves in the pay of a Russian propaganda effort. You love the tenant media. You love the tenant media star. It was so good. And it was such a brief look.

into that world when the indictment came down. Why didn't you remind the viewers what it was? Because they might not be as obsessed as you are. I do. I do. I love it. Tenet Media was a YouTube channel. It was like a YouTube supergroup of people like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson,

Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern. And they were putting out this YouTube content that, to my mind, had no reason to exist. It was getting like a thousand views. Maybe I was wondering why these people were spending their time with it. It was like well-produced. stuff too. It was like high in production. Yeah. It looked really good. And then the FBI helpfully looked into it for me. And they found out that it was being funded by Russia today to the tune of like comical amounts. I think Tim Poole in a year made several million dollars.

I think Dave Rubin was making at least 100 grand per like 10 minute video. And his videos, by the way, were like America's funniest home videos. He would watch like people like falling down a flight of stairs and he'd be like, another, that's a dumbo. And then Russia was like, dosidanya, you know, and so now he's saying, or he claims he didn't know the money came from Russia, but now he's, he's saying, you know, this foreign propaganda, it's got to stop. Yeah, the Tenomini thing was kind of funny. How do they not know where the money was or they just didn't even bother asking either one as a bad explanation? Let me ask you a question about Twitter. Like, I haven't seen if Elon's been defending the new system,

but it does seem to cut against a lot of what he had been doing early on. Like, he had gotten rid of all like the real verification stuff there's so much anonymous accounts the blue check mark became kind of pointless right um this is like a kind of a step in the opposite direction finally and it's kind of refreshing right at least we have some sort of identification of who these people are but um i don't know is he defended it and and i guess if you had your druthers since you're on there all the time like are there additional steps you would like to see them take i'm springing this question on you because we didn't prep for this one but i am kind of curious what you would suggest? As far as I know, I don't think I've seen Elon really defend it. I mean, I, I think

that this executive, this Nikita Beer guy is supposed to be like kind of like the usability user experience king. He's been brought in recently. And so he's supposed to be kind of like cleaning it up after Elon made such a mess of it. And so I don't know if this was kind of some kind of soft to him to I do think like as we discovered with this, people on the right, which is certainly an audience, Elon listens to, we're really mad about this idea. I think that maybe their own crazy making divisive voices were getting drowned out by once from abroad. And the other, in terms of, in terms of changes, I mean, I would like to see, and a lot of people are calling for this, I'd like to see a little flag icon right next to the name

because, you know, I think that would, then you don't have to kind of click through. And in general, I wouldn't mind if there was some kind of deprioritizing of these accounts that like, I mean, they're all like voices in your head when you're on there enough where it's like, it's like, if a man doesn't pay $1,000 for a date, you know, it's over. that you know people go what you know it just makes you nuts no i agree with that i do i think this was like a much needed step honestly these accounts are unreal i mean it's gone to the point where it's like i don't even look at the replies because it's just a bunch of like anonymous people who i assume are just bot farms but whatever um but it's nice honestly it's nice to be able to

click and say oh no you're from like albania great cool i don't have to pay attention um all right man Well, listen, it was good reporting. I'm glad that you did it. I'm happy that you're surviving your four-you feed. And we look forward to the next dispatch, okay? I'm diving back in. I'm sure there's plenty of domestically. You can't get enough.

Crazy stuff to get as well. I'm a little bit worried about your addictions. Okay. Well, Summer, ladies and gentlemen, to help him out, subscribe to the Falls Flagg newsletter and subscribe to our YouTube fee where you get great content like this. Hey, Will, talk to you later, bud. See you later.