Researchers say there are often mixed motivations why an account may not be transparent about its location.
Darren Linvill from Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub is an expert is misinformation
“There are accounts that are run by troll farms, that are run by nation states, and then there are accounts that are just trying to make a buck by pretending to be American.”
Mantzarlis agrees that money is often a factor.
“There is always some money to be made from fanning America’s culture wars on social media.
“That said, organized state actors and political parties have been shown to leverage sockpuppet accounts over and over again, so it’s probably a bit of both.”
But despite X’s new feature, Prof Linvill believes some users will find a workaround.
“Bad actors will very likely quickly adapt… they can round it by VPN, they’ll adapt the way they’re creating their account so it appears they created their account in the west or in the United States”.
Additional reporting by Benedict Garman and Sharihan Al-Akhras