So X quietly dropped this new “About this account” thing and, honestly, it’s doing half the OSINT work for you.
I’ve been poking around with it the last couple of days and the pattern is… interesting:
accounts screaming “USA! 
” in the bio, but the platform itself says based in somewhere completely different – including places like India, Nigeria, Eastern Europe, Israel, etc.
Let me break down what’s going on and drop some refs so you can check it yourself.
What X actually changed
On many profiles you can now tap the “Joined [month year]” line and get an “About this account” popup.
That panel shows things like:
- Country where the account is “based” (derived from signup IP, app store region, activity, etc.)
- How many times the username was changed
- Join date, and sometimes even how the app was downloaded (Play Store, App Store, sideload, etc.)
Officially this is to fight bots and fake profiles and make engagement “more authentic”.
Reality: people immediately started tapping on all the loudest political accounts and posting screenshots.
Big “America First” accounts… not in America
The most solid write-up so far is from The Daily Beast, which looked at big MAGA / “America First” influencer accounts after the feature went live:
- One account branded as a “Patriot Voice for We The People”, ~400k followers,→ shows as based in Eastern Europe .
- A huge Ivanka-Trump fan account (~1M followers), posting anti-immigration / anti-Islam content,→ shows as based in Nigeria .
Their piece also mentions multiple large US-flag-waving accounts listed as being based in Russia, India, etc. once people started hitting the “About this account” panel.
So while these accounts present as “real Americans just vibing with politics”, at least some of them are literally labeled by X itself as running out of foreign countries.
The Israel / India / US government mess
This is where it gets messy and you have to be careful not to eat every screenshot at face value.
1. DHS account “based in Israel”
There’s a Reddit thread going around claiming the official US Department of Homeland Security account was exposed as “created and located in Israel” via this feature, then the label disappeared after people noticed.
Even in that same thread, someone points out a boring explanation: if a social media manager in another country is the one logged in (e.g. for Instagram), the platform can show their country as the account location. In other words:
could be some foreign contractor, could be mislabeling, could be something spicier — but from the outside you can’t tell for sure.
Good example of why this feature is a signal, not proof of some grand conspiracy .
2. “Israeli propaganda accounts based in India”
You’ve probably seen the memes/posts claiming:
“multiple X’s Israeli propaganda accounts are actually based in India”
Two separate things are getting mixed together here:
- It is documented that Indian right-wing / Hindutva accounts have been heavily amplifying pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian disinfo during the Gaza war.
- With the new feature, some people started sharing screenshots that supposedly show pro-Israel accounts as “based in India”.
But:
- There’s already a KnowYourMeme entry documenting that a bunch of “account based in India” screenshots floating around are straight-up edited for clout/trolling. India became the default joke country for this feature.
So yeah, there are definitely foreign networks pushing narratives around Israel/Palestine, and India is clearly part of that ecosystem, but any specific screenshot tying an Israeli account to India via this feature needs a sanity check.
The feature itself is buggy: Mariah Carey as a case study
At one point, Mariah Carey’s official X account suddenly showed up as “based in Israel” , which obviously made conspiracy people go wild.
Later reports said it was a technical glitch during a short test phase where internal device/location data leaked into the UI. Basically: wrong field, wrong place, short time window, big drama.
That’s a nice reminder that:
- Sometimes the explanation is not “secret psyop”, it’s just “dev pushed a half-baked feature into prod”.
- VPNs, multiple admins, agency logins, etc. can also totally skew what the platform thinks your “base country” is.
Why this matters for OSINT / infosec people
For anyone into OSINT, threat intel, or just watching influence ops in the wild, this is actually useful:
- It gives you a cheap extra data point on big political accounts.
- It makes some foreign troll farms / engagement farms ridiculously obvious (US flag, all-caps patriot bio, but “Based in: Lagos” or “Based in: Mumbai” etc.).
- It lines up nicely with what people already found about X’s engagement-for-ad-revenue model incentivising clickbait disinfo around conflicts like Israel–Gaza .
But it’s not magic truth serum. It’s just one more piece of metadata.
How I’d play with it (without being a creep)
If you wanna dig into this yourself:
- Go to any loud political / conflict account. Tap the “Joined …” line → open About this account .
- Check three things:
- “Based in: …”
- How often the username was changed
- When the account was created
- Then compare it to:
- What they claim in bio/banner (country, flags, identity).
- What they post about 90% of the time (US politics vs Middle East vs something else).
- If it smells like a farm:
- Look for a cluster of similar accounts with the same vibe + same country label.
- Screenshot for your notes, but don’t go doxxing random people based on a single UI label.
The line between “identifying coordinated manipulation” and “feeding a harassment mob” is very thin on X right now, so maybe don’t cross it.
Quick refs if you want to go deeper
- New feature explained – TechCrunch, Indian Express, Economic Times and others on how “About this account” shows base country, username changes, app download source, etc.
- Foreign MAGA influencers – Daily Beast investigation on “Top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign actors” (Eastern Europe, Nigeria, India, etc.).
- Accuracy complaints – NDTV + WebProNews on users calling out wrong/misleading country labels.
- Mariah Carey + glitch – Indiattimes write-up of her account briefly showing as Israel-based due to a test bug.
- India + pro-Israel / anti-Palestinian disinfo – Al Jazeera and The New Arab on Indian right-wing accounts leading a lot of the online campaign.
- Fake “based in India” screenshots – KnowYourMeme documenting people editing the new label for memes/clout.
References
Short list if you want to dig deeper or link sources in your thread:
• TechCrunch – X rolls out “About this account”:
• Economic Times – Anti-bot / transparency angle:
• The Daily Beast – MAGA influencers labeled as foreign:
• KnowYourMeme – “Twitter / X Country of Origin Feature”:
• Al Jazeera – Indian disinfo around Israel–Gaza:
• IndiaTimes – Mariah Carey “Israel” location glitch: