On Friday 21 November, ‘X’ (Twitter for the elderly) finally introduced a novelty it had been announcing for months: the possibility of seeing from which country each user writing on the platform is operating.

The effect was shocking.
Millions of profiles, whose tweets and comments we were used to reading to fuel the permanent political clash in our societies, were revealed for what they were: fakes assembled on an industrial scale on the Indian subcontinent or in the Sahara countries.

Curried patriots

In some cases, the unmasking has reached tragicomic heights.
Ivanka Trump‘s official account, for instance, is based in Nigeria. The ‘Russian Army‘ account is operating from India. ‘America First‘ lives in Bangladesh, and the famous pro-Trump and anti-Ukrainian patriot Jackson Hinkle lives in Burkina Faso.

Burkinabé is also ‘Native American Soul‘, the revanchist page that explains ‘what they don’t tell you in schools’ about US history. And ‘Charlie’s Voice Rising‘, a profile that passes on the memory of Charlie Kirk to almost 190,000 followers, acts from a ‘non-EU Eastern European’ country.

As for ‘Redpill media‘, which proudly states of itself ‘I am an American citizen who will never die for Israel’, it is Pakistani. “Manly mentor“, a guru for frustrated males with 250,000 followers who claims to live in Colorado, is actually Indian.
“Mary Tiles“, the Texan who explains how great it is to be an old-fashioned woman and find “Bible, meat, milk, toolbox and firearms” in her suitors’ homes , actually speaks to her 170,000 followers from Russia.
“Fan Trump Army” pontificates in front of 600,000 followers from a country in Indochina.

A shadow puppetry theatre

In short: for the first time, we ordinary users have experienced first-hand how ‘X’ is a huge shadow puppetry theatre, where most of the traffic, texts, content and ‘likes’ we come across are generated by non-existent people through diligent ex-Third World operators rewarded with two bits of change.

The algorithm written by Elon Musk does the rest: the pro-Trump, pro-Maga and occasional allies one chooses from time to time (Putin, Orbán, Farage and in general everything anti-Ukraine and anti-EU) content is pushed by the algorithm and goes viral, while anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-Ukraine and pro-EU content is left visible only to the very narrow extent necessary to continue to convey a conflicting and polarised atmosphere.

This unpleasant reality has been discussed for years, with terms that are perhaps a little too videogame-like and far removed from ordinary people (such as ‘troll farm‘ or ‘echo chamber‘).
Yesterday, however, anyone could see it for themselves, simply by reading which country each ‘patriotic’ user was broadcasting from.
Not surprisingly, after barely half an hour, the management of ‘X’ withdrew the novelty, blacking out the countries of origin again. Officially, it stated that the experiment had only been a test to make improvements and then reintroduce the feature permanently.

In reality, the embarrassment of the conjurer who accidentally exposed his trick to millions of paying viewers is evident.
What I wouldn’t have given to get on the company’s board call yesterday afternoon….

Not only Musk

Other social media, as we know, work in a similar way.
Zuckerberg himself stated in the spring that on the Meta group’s social media (Facebook and Instagram) only 7% of the content we see is now produced by people we know by name.
The remaining 93% is composed of unknown profiles selected for us by the algorithm or by advertisements from advertisers.

Entering Facebook or Instagram, therefore, means undergoing a gentle and constant brainwashing, whose programme is selected by those who control the most efficient network of Bengalis and Nigerians armed with AI.
Let’s not talk about Tiktok, which outside the US is still owned by the Chinese Communist Party and thus displays all these flaws in an even more extreme and shameless manner.

One would be tempted to see the hand of karma or divine justice in this ‘revenge of the third world’, which has poisoned and weakened Western politics so irreparably in just a few years by exploiting social media algorithms.

Were it not that, sadly, the instigators of the crime are none other than the most powerful men in the world today: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, the reactionary international woven by Steve Bannon and the transhumanist oligarchs of Silicon Valley. (The media fever over Gaza has also confirmed the descent of the Qatari methane sheiks, who will have to be closely monitored in the coming years).
And unfortunately, in the face of such principals, any sympathy for the poor material perpetrators living in Karachi or Ouagadougou quickly wanes.

The social media have become a trap, a castle of spells like those of Ariosto’s poems. There is no point in continuing to hide this from us, and it is hypocritical to continue doing nothing.

As a recent statistic observed, US adults spend an average of 8 hours a day watching images or videos between television and social media.
One X user (who knows from which part of the globe) commented: “We cannot understand our age if we do not realise that for many people, reality is now a marginal fact relegated to the interval between one video and another.

For us Europeans it is not so different. But we, the Europeans, at least for now, do not have the masters of the big platforms directly involved in the government in Brussels.
We have a (narrow) window to react. Let’s not waste it.