Sean Rad is the founder of Tinder. Zach Schapira is a former executive of Twitter and X.
This past weekend, a new feature on the social media platform X pulled back the digital curtain, offering a rare glimpse into the true origins of some of the platform’s most vocal accounts. With the rollout of the “About this account” tool, users who had confidently presented themselves as grassroots American patriots were suddenly exposed as posting from Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey and elsewhere. The revelation — and the contentious response to it — was an immediate flash point in the continuing debate over online authenticity.
We live in a world where physical borders still matter profoundly. Nations maintain boundaries because they foster sovereignty, trust and security. Attempts to weaken or remove those borders have become major drivers of global instability, as well as major electoral issues across nearly every democracy in the West. Simply put, borders are a key bulwark against chaos.
Social platforms fundamentally changed how people and ideas move across borders. A borderless digital ecosystem shrank distances, opened markets and created the potential for a global town square. Those benefits are profound, and worth preserving. But when political conversation moved online, one assumption baked into that early design became dangerously outdated: that geography no longer matters. Social platforms elevated voices globally by making geography invisible, but in the process left users without a clear sense of where content was coming from.
That vacuum made it effortless for foreign actors to pose as Americans and amplify divisive narratives to stoke internal conflict. Today, a U.S. adversary needs only an account that looks, sounds and behaves like a voter in Michigan, New York or Texas to infiltrate the digital border and try to influence domestic views. These accounts strike at highly controversial issues across left and right, such as assassinations or mayoral elections, as well as heated foreign policy issues, whether in Ukraine or Venezuela or Gaza.
X’s recent bold decision, led by Head of Product Nikita Bier, to add country labels to accounts reflects an important shift: a recognition that geographic transparency is crucial context to help users understand whether a post is a firsthand account or distant commentary, whether it reflects genuine local sentiment or coordinated foreign messaging. After all, posts from the “Ivanka Trump News” account with 1 million followers feel very different once you learn the account is posting from Nigeria.
Lifting the veil on these accounts is a promising start. But the platforms have a long road ahead to construct true digital borders. Here are some ideas for platforms to consider if they want to join this effort.
First and most important, platforms could build on the precedent X has set to expand geographic transparency. This includes more prominent placement of location data, at both the account and post levels. If a post is going viral or a story is trending, Americans should know which countries are driving that engagement.
Second, recommendation algorithms could prioritize authentic domestic content, especially when it receives authentic domestic engagement. Americans debating issues that affect their communities deserve a feed that reflects real local voices and the real local popularity of those voices.
Third, users should be able to filter or limit content from specific regions. Some may want a global feed; others may prefer a more domestic one.
Finally, platforms will need to incorporate more authenticity signals as efforts to game location become more sophisticated. Where location patterns are suspicious or opaque, platforms could publicly reflect this uncertainty, or even downrank these posts and accounts.
These recommendations are all made alongside a fundamental commitment to freedom of expression. None of them limits expression of views, any more than publishing nutrition facts on food packaging limits what may or may not be eaten.
Platforms cannot completely fix this problem on their own, and there is a role for the U.S. government to play. As Bier noted over the weekend, asserting digital borders is itself a daunting challenge. But attempting to do this with limited force of law or deterrence is virtually impossible. When bad actors spoof their geolocation, mass-produce AI personas or otherwise engage in inauthentic behavior, the main recourse platforms have is to suspend those accounts.
From July to December 2024, for example, X suspended 335,675,897 fake or spam accounts — nearly 2 million per day. That’s a staggering figure, and the advent of AI is only making things more difficult. These are well-resourced networks, many tied to foreign governments running influence operations.
An initial step the U.S. government can take is to make an even higher priority of treating foreign influence as a national security and diplomatic issue. Without material consequences and structural disincentives to deter state and criminal actors from engaging in industrial-scale manipulation, the problem will likely worsen.
Digital borders won’t solve every problem. But this weekend’s “great unmasking” by X was a step in giving Americans something they have never truly had online: the ability to understand the context of who is speaking to them. And that must be the starting point for any society trying to maintain trust and sovereignty in a world where influence no longer requires crossing a physical border.
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