Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The MAGA Twitter Apocalypse w/ Charlie Warzel

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz   Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co   Over the weekend, Twitter descended into complete and utter chaos. Elon Musk rolled out a feature called “About This Account” that allowed people to click on the profile of an X user and see exactly what country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed. Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” were identified as originating in places like India, Pakistan, Russia, or Nigeria, engagement farming to earn money through X's creator revenue program, available to those who purchase a blue check. Charlie Warzel is a longtime technology writer at The Atlantic who has been covering this rollout. Today he's joining me to discuss whether the "about this account" feature is truly 9/11 for pro MAGA accounts, how our internet is being warped by inauthentic activity, whether this truly signifies the end of the social web, and what comes next. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz         https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0         https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Who's to say that any of this stuff is real or what they say they are? That just feels to me like game over, you know? It's a really dark situation. For the past 72 hours, Twitter has descended into complete and utter chaos. Elon Musk rolled out a feature called About This Account that allowed people to click on the profile of any ex-user and see exactly what country that account was created in, where the user was currently based, and how many times the username had been changed. Nikita Beer, X's head of product said that the feature was, quote, an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square. Four hours later, he posted another update, quote, I need a drink.

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as America First or MAGA were identified as originating in places like India, Pakistan, Russia, and Nigeria. Engagement farming to earn money through X's creator revenue program, which is available to those who purchase a blue check. Charlie Worsall is a longtime technology writer at The Atlantic who's been covering this rollout. Today, he joined me to discuss whether the About This Account feature is truly 9-11 for MAGA accounts, how our internet is being warped by inauthentic activity, whether this truly signifies the end of the era of the social web, and what comes next? Charlie, welcome to Power User.

Thank you for having me. You were one of the first people I thought of when I was sort of like thinking about all of this chaos, and you wrote such a great piece titled Elon Musk's worthless poisoned hall of mirrors. And I feel like it was just such a good way to describe what was going on on Twitter. To start off, I just want to ask, maybe you know better than I. Why would X do something like this? Why would they reveal that basically half the website is just like scammers and spammers? I honestly have no idea.

I think we all remember when Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, that there was a real obsession of his, whether it was real or not. of getting rid of bots, right, of getting rid of spam, that the entire website of old Twitter was just like riddled with fake accounts and all kinds of, you know, BS. Hilariously, that version of Twitter also had like a working verification system where people were actually the people who they said they were as long as they had the blue check marks. He got rid of that, of course, instituted a pay-for-play system, which sort of set the groundwork for this like information hellscape that we're all currently watching unfold.

So maybe there was a little of this where he was like incredibly naive about the website and he actually wanted to create, you know, some kind of transparency. Maybe he had no real idea. You know, we don't really know how much he's paying attention to the nuts and bolts of Twitter. The person who was like handling this rollout was Twitter's head of product, Nikita Bierre. And Elon was actually like very quiet about this. I think he reposted something from the satirical Babylon B about like, oh, wow, you know, Like, who knew there were fake accounts on the internet? But I really can't answer that question for you.

It's just a very classic example of how X operates, right? Which is like they made a big deal that they were going to do this. They're like, this is the first step in the transparency process, rolled it out, and then immediately there was this chaos. And then there was this admission from the head of product at X that people were being falsely labeled, right? There were some people who were being labeled as being out of the country when they were actually American citizens. And so you have this like actual nightmare, right, where nobody knows anything. Nothing is true and everything is possible. Well, I kind of want to like give people that weren't on Twitter this fast weekend a little bit of a recap because I feel like a lot of people have seen what's going on and we can all understand sort of the context.

But what were some of the more egregious examples that you've seen? I saw the one that's most viral, which is the people claiming that the DHS was based in Israel. Nikita Beer came out and said, guys, that was not real. But what were some other sort of, I guess, notable accounts that you saw that were revealed to be fakes? I mean, these aren't accounts that like we, you or I are normal people. Yeah, like we're not like, you know, like hanging out with these guys. A lot of them are like big mega fan accounts, right? Like there was a really big Ivanka Trump fan account that was supposedly based in the United States that wasn't.

There was a Baron Trump one with I think like 500, 500,000 followers. Again, a Baron Trump fan account is like sort of hard for me to wrap my head around anyway. Some of the ones that I highlighted in our piece were there was this account, MAGA Nation X, which had 400,000 followers at the time I wrote it, and was a, quote, Patriot voice for We the People. That was based in Eastern Europe, according to the tool. There was a account called Maga Nadine, who claimed to be living and posting in the United States, but according to the tool, was posting in Morocco.

My favorite and sort of, it was a small account, but it felt like it was symbolic of all of this, was the handle at American, which was based in, Pakistan, according to the future. Of course. It's kind of crazy how many of, you know, these people were based in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. It seemed like there was somebody did some tweet, and I don't know how they were sort of calculating this, but they were sort of saying that the majority of the Elon Musk fan accounts were based in Africa. And just how skewed to the right politically it was. Like, I think it just revealed so much about the ideology that Musk was promoting, because I didn't see any blue MAGA accounts revealed. I think I saw maybe one, but I feel like overwhelmingly

we were talking about like right wing grifts. Yeah, I saw a couple of accounts that were, it was more like purporting to be journalists of different kinds that were unveiled. But I think that's not surprising. I mean, I was talking about this with someone earlier and they're like, well, it's got to be both like a left and right phenomenon. And it probably to some degree is, like it's, I think like for us to be honest, it's extremely difficult to wrap our heads around this. Like you're kind of only able to see what it is you can see. So like, unless I started going through every,

account that I saw in clicking. Like, it's tough, it's tough to know. The main prominent examples, though, tended to be these really big, hyperpartisan, like, prolifically posting far right or mega accounts. And that makes a lot of sense, I think, just when you think about what X is, right? Since Musk bought it, he's used it as this political weapon.

Like, as recently the last week, he was talking about greasing the, like, algorithmic skids to favor right-wing talking points. someone said last week to him, why are all these, you know, Democratic politicians entering my feeds with their posts? And he was like, we're working on it. We're trying to fix the algorithm. So it's like, it's clear he's, he's trying to promote a certain thing. So of course there's going to be more and more prominent and more viral right wing accounts than there are going to be left wing accounts. Yeah. When I saw this happening, it reminded me a little bit of the like 2017 Macedonian teenager thing on Facebook. And I'm wondering, like, do you think that this is just sort of a phase that all social networks need to. to go through. Obviously, Elon Musk exacerbated it, but it seems like every social network has had a phase where they've dealt with just being absolutely overrun by, like, scammers who are manipulating these algorithmic feeds.

I was looking today in the response to the piece that I wrote and someone was like, I feel like I'm being like gaslit here, right? Like, this is just a thing that has happened forever. Like, we've known that trolls are everywhere, right? Or these fake accounts and sock puppets. And I think that like we have to acknowledge that's true, the Macedonian teens, the Russian IRA, you know, accounts, like all kinds of foreign influence operations. Like, it's not a novel thing to say that people aren't who they say they are or aren't posting from where they say they are on the internet and on any social network. But there is something novel about this because Musk has, like, a great ability whether he wants to or not of just, like, creating witch hunts,

right? Like, it's just sort of like, what he exists to do. And this tool just did that, right? It just set people off and it created this like arms race of like pointing at other accounts to score political points. Like I put this in the piece, but like I feel like it's worth highlighting that there was there's this account that is this Islamophobic pro-Israel account with a checkmark that was just constantly posting like, you know, really aggressively like racist, awful stuff. And over the weekend was calling for Mamdani's deportation. Turns out that account was based in South Asia, right? So I go and I'm like looking through this person's account or whatever, this figure's account. And this account who is not who they say they are is going and finding other accounts and being like, you're posting from Pakistan, you're posing from Bangladesh.

And so like you have these fake people arguing with other people screaming that they're fake. And it's like, what are we doing here? It just feels like more and more of the web is like manipulated and spam. And I'm thinking also of just like a recent conversation on tech Twitter that I'm sure you've seen about in recent Horowitz funding basically like the equivalent of a bot farm. This has been like this thing now where ever since Cluelly, which was this like one viral startup, all the VCs sort of discovered the concept of virality. And they're like funding these startups that are very focused on virality and engage in like spam behavior. And I don't know. Is this just like the end point of like the identification of the internet too where it's just like this type of behavior is so incentivized that it's.

almost difficult to eradicate. It really feels like there has been this change, and I think it's definitely tied to generative AI, right? Where the people building these platforms are almost like the perfect versions of these platforms there aren't actually humans on them, right? Like what would be better than getting rid of like the pesky humanity of all these users with their demands and their, you know, abilities to break the terms of service or whatever? Like, what if we can just control all these people?

And I think that like that sounds so cynical when you're say it and yet the Andresen like bot farm thing that seems like something like the meta's vibes app and the Sora 2 app like those are algorithmic social quote unquote social feeds that don't really have any like human made content in them there seems to be this like pivoting towards the artificial towards like towards the slop towards this like it's not necessary to have humans creating this stuff on the internet and then it doesn't really make sense to me because I think if you ask these people things they want human eyeballs, they want human behavior and human like dollars, right? Like, so it's very, it's very strange to me.

The pivot feels so unbelievably cynical and yet like it feels like everyone's just playing a ridiculously short game, right? Like, this is not a long-term strategy. Like, you might have a whole bunch of boomers are older on Facebook who don't really know exactly what they're seeing, engaging with slop and rage bait and stuff. But that's not like a model for the world. I just don't, I don't really understand like what what the end game is here. It's so weird how like AI driven discussions are just being like integrated everywhere. I mean not only are there the AI like you said the LLM sort of influenced accounts and like these bot accounts and stuff but it's like add chat chTPT to your group chat you know or yeah like meta being like chat with your AI bestie or replica and all these other

kind of things. It just seems like yeah there is this push for all of us to be in a bubble just sort of interacting with an endless array of AI accounts but then they want to monetize it obviously as humans because human eyeballs are worth a ton more than AI eyeballs. What about like the culture war aspect of it? I mean, what do you think this says about sort of our political system and how much influence do you think this like massive, it's not really a coordinated influence operation, but just the fact that there's just so much right wing foreign slop on Twitter seems notable, especially like this was something that was like, we had like literally years of press coverage when there was like a fraction of this happening

on Facebook. And I feel like now it's like an entire social media platform. And the main social platform for news and you know there's articles like wow that's crazy damn you know but are we going to get like congressional investigations i don't know probably not right now i don't even know if if like congress is functioning people are just resigning and stuff it's very very hard to know about that but i do think that a lesson from this is that like our culture wars are very clearly real right our political divides very clearly real no one would say otherwise but it seems to be like what what what this seems to indicate is that they are like potentially massively or at least very importantly inflated by all these types of, you know, rage merchants and people posing as

American citizens or citizens of any country, like trying to inflame these political tensions to get attention and then, you know, monetize that. And so I think there's like this very interesting question about like what percentage of some of these like viral outrage events, right? Like the American Eagle thing or the Cracker Barrel thing. Like what? percentage of these ones that aren't like actually driven by something very serious. Like we know that they're really animating political debates, right? Like trans issues or you know, there are things where it's very clear that people are outraged on on a lot of different sides and like clashing in these spaces. But these very like small and weird ones, it's not necessarily clear. And I think

we have to hold some space for the idea that like maybe these are a little bit fake or inflated. I saw this one very real person. I like went and did my research to make sure that they're real. But there was this great comment on X where this this person said, quote, it's fascinating to look through every account I've disagreed with and find out they're all fake. And I was just like staring into the middle distance on this. That just feels to me like game over, you know. It's a really dark situation. I hope that this causes, although I doubt that it will, the media to reflect. on this as well and I wonder if this will inform coverage because I mean you and I both cover like online culture and I feel like so much of online culture coverage or just like viral news coverage is covering this chum assigning some 22 year old or probably future getting some AI to just like

regurgitate this like online outrage or online debate around Sydney Sweet around like some sort of manufacturer drama or cracker bail rule or whatever they're the sort of the anger of the day is and then amplifying that in the traditional media and making it seem a lot bigger when you know a lot of times when you dig into these fake outrages, especially the crack or barrel one, it was like, that was not driven primarily by like crack or barrel consumers. Absolutely. And I think people always bring up whenever you write about or talk about something that's happening on X and they say, you know, this is such a small platform comparatively. Like, why do we care? Why do we care? And like, you and I know and so many other journalists know, that a lot of influencers, politicians, media

members, they sit on Twitter. And yes, they're used to like you just said to assign stories and stuff. and that, you know, adds to the narrative and fans the flames. But also, it's become just so commonplace for political influencers and politicians to cherry pick these accounts, right, and hold them up and just be like, look at the woke left is out of control or like, this person's a flagrant racist or this person's not parenting their kids, right? Whatever it is, right? And it's held up as these like ways to score these political points.

And I think it's a really great thing for us all to like take a beat and see this and go, like, Who's to say that any of this stuff is, like, is real or what they say they are? I also just wonder, too, like, what the long-term effects of having this feature on will be. I mean, meta has had this on for a while on Instagram, and I don't really see a lot of people checking the Instagram, like, about this account type thing before resharing a bunch of, like, rage bait or misinformation or whatever. So I wonder, I mean, obviously this past weekend was super viral and there's all these conversations about it, but I don't know.

I mean, like Ian Miles Chung, we know that he's. doesn't live in America. Like, there's all these bad actors. Like, we know that they're not American. And yet, they still have this huge voice because they're amplified in the right-wing media, or they're just sort of given credence. I feel like this could just sort of like go nowhere too in a week. Yeah, it'll definitely fade.

I mean, I think everything does nowadays. Like, I'm trying more nowadays to think a little bit like long term on all these things. And it does feel like when you create these like information war zones that feel punishing to be on where everyone is the worst version of themselves all the time, that if you start to then realize on the outside of it that like everyone may be fake or mislabeling themselves, like, or anyone can declare that the other person is fake. Like the thing that I saw that like really was most sort of grim and troubling was that on Sunday, the Israel Foreign Ministry posted a screenshot of an account that was purporting to be a journalist reporting from Gaza. And they posted the account and then a screenshot next to it saying that this account was based in Poland. And they said, quote, reporting from Gaza.

is fake and not reliable, makes you wonder how many more fake reports have you read? And then in response, this person purporting to be a journalist, I can't verify that personally, but they were showing videos that looked like they were from Gaza saying, my three kids and my wife were killed, I'm going to stay here until I die, I promise you this isn't true. Like when you think about the muddying of information in a conflict and in a situation that is so dire, Like, that to me is like, it's showing that these platforms, to get back to, like, the broader point, they're not just, like, bad sometimes. Like, it's, like, fundamentally poisonous to society, right?

Like, you are, you are blurring the lines between truth and fiction and letting people, you know, cast dispersions on reality when it's useful to them, including foreign governments, potentially. And it's like these little cracks keep building up. Like, I don't know how much longer people want to participate in these spaces, right? I feel the same way, too, Charlie. And but at the same time, I did notice, and maybe it's also just today, there's also talk of Congress reviving the Kids Online Safety Act, which anybody that listens to my podcast, though, I hate, I'm so against it. But there's all these people that are like, this is why we need real identity. Like, this is why you need to start scanning your face before you log on the internet.

This is the only way. And we've seen this big push, especially. I think there's 11 states right now that have identity verification laws up for consideration. It terrifies me because that, of course, ultimately just leads to more surveillance, more expansion. And we've seen these platforms like meta, you know, Google and meta roll this out. And it doesn't make anyone safer. It just allows them to harvest and then monetize even more data, including biometric data. So I don't know.

I'm nervous that a lot of this will be used at like because I feel like it's happening right as we're seeing this campaign for sort of mass censorship and surveillance. And I'm curious kind of how you think those things intersect. It seems right now that this issue is just being weaponized. Like this small little about this account feature is being weaponized by everyone who can for whatever purposes they want to, right? It seems likely that if that fight is going to happen, sure, that this could be like a place where it is weaponized. I'm trying to think a little past like the paradigm of like how do we work with these platforms. How do we fix them? And you cover this better than anyone.

Like I feel like there is this very, very nascent cultural movement towards like this is bullshit. Like, I'm not against the internet. I'm not against these platforms. But I am against this feeling that everywhere I go, I am constantly manipulated. It's the feeling of, I think it's overwhelming to people. And they're just like, I, this hyper commercialized, everything's a casino. Everything's algorithmic. You know, the new American dream is like hitting a parlay or like getting a meme coin cash out.

Like people are associating that with these platforms. And I just don't know how much longer until something starts to like actually crack here. I don't think this is a nascent move. I think that's the vibe. for everyone. And I think it's really similar to honestly, like, a lot of the environmental stuff where like I went through this recently. I had to get new pots and pans and stuff. And like, it is crazy to me that you cannot, there's not just like a website where it's like, can I just buy something that's not toxic? Can I, can I know that whatever I buy is not coded in Pfas and I'm going to kill me or

have the wrong, whatever? And I feel like that with the internet too, where it's like, can we just get like one app that isn't like this hellscape or whatever? I don't see anything emerging. Like I think that the social web era is pretty dead in the sense that like everyone feels this way. These platforms have been milk to death. They're not breaking them up, unfortunately. Like, there's not saying to take their place except like Sora. Yeah, the inhuman stuff. Right. But also like this backlash is being so effectively weaponized. Like this sentiment that people feel, which is very real and they're totally accurate that like it sucks to be on these platforms and they are manipulating you and they are probably like destroying our political system in

ways. But that is being used to manufacture consent for some of the worst, most dangerous internet laws that we've ever seen in our lifetime. And that feels really dark, too. And so I just increasingly see these, like, bans. And it's like, just ban it all. Just, I mean, even in the end of your piece, I think you say, like, the only rational response to all of this is to log off.

And like, it feels that way sometimes because it feels like there's no winning. If you, like, make the case against Twitter, which is like such an easy case to make, right? It's owner, the political project. The fact that everyone's for you page is just, like, neo-Nazi stuff, like the snuff films, the whatever, The fact that everyone, you know, is saying they're someone different than they actually are, posting from a different place, that it's like being used to, like, all that stuff.

And then on top of it, the fact of like, spending time in this place makes me feel bad. I have this one precious life and I'm like using it staring into this particular box. Like, I'm not anti-internet. Like, I write about technology because I one time, like, genuinely like loved it and still love like the promise of it, right? I love new things, cool things. But like, I read a piece recently by, I think it was Jeremiah Johnson about like Mark Andreessen and sort of like the moral decay of Silicon Valley, right? I think that was the word they used.

And this idea of like the bot thing, the cheating apps, you know, this idea like investing in, Andrescent Horowitz investing in these things that it's like gamifying your payments, right? And like like just really bleak, bleak stuff. And then a couple of like hours. after I saw that post, I believe. Like, that was when Mark Andreessen, like, posted something at the Pope about AI or whatever. And then all of these people in Silicon Valley were like, dude, like, they shamed him for it. And it was this one weird sort of brief moment in this long sort of Silicon Valley reactionary mindset where it was sort of like, people were like, dude, what are you doing, man?

Like, this is just like, it, like, this is not it. And I just wonder if that's like a glimmer of something that may come down the road of like this different turn of like, we are not offering like a positive vision of anything to people. And they're going to tune out at some point, aren't they? Before you get too optimistic. I'm not trying to be. No, no, no. I felt the same way when I saw that. A lot of those people, though, are accelerationist AI people that feel like actually what you should really be building is the super intelligent AI and not the lottery app.

which, okay, and a lot of them work in defense tech. It's the like weird, like, hyper Catholic, hyper Christian people that are building like next generation weapons. And so I just, I take their point and I agree with them that Mark Andrewsson is evil, terrible person. But they're also building terrible. I mean, this is like a whole other discussion, but like I just, I wonder if there's anyone out there building good technology. And if that good technology is being built, I know there's efforts like blue sky and the Fedover's or whatever. But like they can't compete with. these monopolistic tech platforms.

And so I don't know. I hear you. And I think that that's actually like, it's the dose of reality in terms of this is not a fair fight. This is like, it's kind of coming from from all sides. I don't think people are going to get lost online. But I do think that like, I don't know, I've been writing a lot about live streaming and live streaming is also being gamified.

Like a lot of the most successful streams are just 24-7 Mr. B style games or things like that. Challenges, lock-ins, whatever. But like, I do think there's something to this. like collective reality where like people want to feel this like connection. And I think that's what we've lost with so much of the current internet and algorithms and everything is that like sense of connection and sort of like simultaneous like socialization, you know, where you're like really talking to someone or you're really watching someone. I think it's that and I also think it is something based around this idea of taste, right?

Like I think one of the big problems with like our algorithm like hell, right, is this this notion that like you give an algorithm one insight and you know it just repeats the same thing back to you and i think we see this everywhere right like we see this in the media the media is like okay they like this thing let's give them this thing forever you know and people i think are gravitating towards taste and like curation and this idea of like i have my sense of this thing i'm going to make something for you or share something for you and you may not like it like there's no audience testing for this i'm just giving it to you and people like thank thank god like this just feels human to me.

It's that, like, it's that connection, right? That unexpected, like, I didn't ask for this and I love it, or I didn't ask for this and I hate it, you know, like, at least, at least I didn't ask for this. I like that. I hope that that's the way it goes. Because I love, I feel like myself too, just trying to escape the algorithm and spend more time with like weird curators or just finding things that are a little bit, like you said, off the beaten path.

Just people making stuff, right? Like, fundamentally making stuff, like the human quality of making stuff is about like having something up here, having some sort of skill, and like bringing that idea that's here, like, into some sort of, you know, reality of some kind. And like, that's the whole, that's the special sauce of like being alive. And I think like a lot of these platforms and a lot of like the way that this like dead end sort of over extracted, you know, social web is, is just like it's kind of killed that, right? And so I think hopefully we get a little more of it. Hopefully we move back to the making things internet. We live long enough to see the downfall of Elon Musk and

Mark Andreessen and everything will be great again. Who knows? I'm going to try to make stuff and I know you're doing that. So that's like, that's going to keep me seen. All right, Charlie, well, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. All right, that's it for the show. If you like this episode, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter, UserMag at UserMag.com. That's usermag.com. Speaking of making things, I produce this podcast entirely by myself and I have zero long-term brand partners. So every single dollar of your support helps the show continue and helps keep my reporting alive.

I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.