Trolling for Cash

Almost immediately, “people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on U.S. politics appeared to be based outside of the U.S.,” The Verge said.
X update unveils foreign MAGA boosters

Number of people surprised by this turn of events: Probably zero.

The piece points out that for people in Africa and Southeast Asia, the income provided by winding people up on X can be significant. And when people need income, they're not always going to be picky about how they get it. The modern Internet is awash with people who are pretending to be someone and/or somewhere they are not, because their real identities and locations aren't valuable. After all, no one really cases what a Russian or an Indian thinks of American politics. But this random fellow American that one knows nothing about who just happens to have something to say that aligns with one's preconceptions? They're certainly worth a follow and not all manipulating people.

Because, supposedly, whatever viewpoint or information is on offer helps prove that The Other Side is not only wrong, but deliberately perverse. And that's the important thing. With Americans desperate to score points on one another, and that desperation having advertising dollars attached to it, it's to be expected that people from other countries would want to get in on the act, even if they aren't part of a foreign influence campaign. Income, after all, is income. And the worldwide nature of the attention economy allows people from poor countries around the world to participate in it.

Of course, it's not just the Make America Great Again crowd that's willing to pay attention to anyone willing to provide them with ammunition in the culture wars. The tally may be lopsided, but both sides have their free agents. In part because if the offshore voices were all MAGA, that would have been suspicious, but even in a culture war, there's work for mercenaries on all sides of the conflict.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I expect that a number of accounts will either suddenly shift to the United States, or disappear, some to quickly reappear with new, "onshore" identities. Those operators who can't afford a VPN that will allow them to pretend to be in the United States will simply go away, as the proof of their locations renders them useless as culture war combatants. So I suspect that the rollout of account locations on X will benefit the formal influence campaigns at the expense of the free agents. Either way, the rage-baiting will continue; there will still be money in it.