By Sack Head Shaun

X Has Been a Mess for a While

X has been a wild ride over the past year and a half to say the least. Between algorithm changes that shove accounts you never asked for into your timeline and a bot population that appears to be growing instead of shrinking, it has been a circus. The so called influencers of the political space seem to get boosted into every corner of the platform no matter how irrelevant the topic is, while others sound like they are screaming into the void.

Elon Musk has made many changes to the site. Some decent, some not so decent, but it is a work in progress. One of the next updates will involve Grok adjusting the algorithm constantly to favor posts that have “substance.” Do not ask me how that works because I could not tell you, but if it functions the way he describes it might solve one of the largest problems on X.

The second problem is harder to ignore.

The Bots Were Never Just Bots

The biggest issue on X is the rise of foreign bots pretending to be citizens of the country they are targeting. These accounts try to change political opinions in whatever nation they are parasitizing. They pretend to vote in our elections. They pretend to live in our neighborhoods. They pretend to speak for our culture. They pretend to have a stake in the outcome. For a long time, there was no way to verify any of it.

That changed this week.

X now displays where an account is based and where the app is connected from. Suddenly the magic trick does not work. You can see in plain view that many of the “Americans” arguing about American elections are not Americans at all.

I do not care if someone in the UK wants to comment on United States politics. There is a difference between a British user weighing in with their two cents (2 pence, 2 quid, whatever they use) and a foreign actor pretending to be a voting American with skin in the game. The first is free speech. The second is subversion.

The Bridge Analogy That Explains It All

Imagine a massive bridge that is about to collapse. You bring in fifty bridge engineers and fifty structural engineers to figure it out. They do not agree on everything, but they share a common goal. Now picture a manager who suddenly hires twenty people with zero engineering background and gives them the same level of input as the experts.

A few of these new hires hope the bridge collapses because they can live stream it and collect money.

That is social media. The non engineers are the foreign bot farms. They do not want a successful country. They do not want unity. They want chaos, anger and division, and they want to monetize it. They live to stir the pot while pretending to belong to the country they are destabilizing.

This new transparency feature will not fix everything, but it does make their presence obvious. Now it is on users to handle them.

The Block Button Is Your Best Friend

You have always had the power to block any account you find suspicious or annoying. Now that X reveals where accounts are actually based, there is no excuse not to use it. The block button is the only tool that can starve these troll farms of reach.

This brings me to the most recent example.

The Case of “Alex Cole” and the Unmasking of a Fake American

One of the largest accounts exposed this week is the influencer known as “Alex Cole,” whose real name appears to be Nicholas Herious. His account has more than 327k followers and for years he has portrayed himself as a progressive American Anti Trump voter. He inserts himself into United States political debates with confidence and authority.

Except he is not American.

Within forty eight hours of the new X feature going live, users discovered that his connection and location were not inside the United States. They traced him to Canada. From there, digital sleuths dug deeper and found that he appears to have been born and raised in the Bahamas and now lives in Canada. His LinkedIn profile does not show any employment in the United States.

His online persona is a character. A made up political avatar.

Once exposed, he attempted a quiet rebrand by adding a Canadian flag, blocking replies, and shifting his biography. He went from being a loud American voter to being an “American living in Canada,” which is quite a pivot for someone who spent years insisting that he votes in United States elections.

Influence Without Skin in the Game

To be clear, there are likely many non American “Maga” accounts as well. The difference is that these accounts:

• Do not usually pretend to vote in our elections
• Do not claim to be American citizens
• Do not have hundreds of thousands of followers
• Do not generate enormous reach on political posts

Alex Cole did all of that. He influenced conversations daily while presenting himself as a United States voter. It was a lie that shaped debates across the platform.

You Can End This Anytime You Want

If Alex Cole wants to claim he once lived on the moon, that is his choice. People can invent whatever persona they want online. But you do not have to give them your attention. You do not have to give them engagement. You do not have to let them shape your political environment.

Hit the block button.

Not just on Alex. On every foreign account that pretends to be something it is not. If enough people do that, the conversation on X improves instantly. You do not need Elon to fix it. You have always had the power.

The sooner we silence the fakes, the sooner we can have honest political conversations with actual Americans.

The power is yours.

This op ed was written by Sack Head Shaun, host of The Edge of Liberty on the SHR Media Network. You can read more of my work and watch past episodes on my author page here

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