Networks of MAGA bots posing as Americans and featuring AI errors are being run from Asia

Thanks to a new X feature that reveals where an account is operated from and whether a VPN tool is being used, social media and news outlets have been able to collect extensive evidence showing that many highly politicized posts by users posing as residents of the United States, Israel, and other countries are in fact being produced by people living in the developing world. As the Bot Blocker project revealed to The Insider, several networks of “MAGA patriots” pretending to be Americans are being administered from Southeast Asia. The new X feature does not always show the precise location, and it can sometimes be detected only through indirect clues.

Project analysts identified five groups of “MAGA accounts,” the largest of which contains more than 200 “individual” voices. The following signs indicate that nominally separate accounts are working together to spread a specific political message:

• Most of the accounts were created on the same date or started actively spreading pro-Trump ideas simultaneously.
• Accounts within one network are typically linked to the same country or to neighboring countries (such as Vietnam and Cambodia). Some bot accounts, according to X data, are linked only to the U.S.
• In the largest of the bot groups, which turns out to be based in Vietnam, almost all of the accounts claim in their profiles to be located in Boston, and many share the same birth year or exact birthdate.
• Many bots use neural networks to run their accounts, which sometimes gives away their origin when content slips from English into the language of the operator’s country (Vietnamese or Burmese). The Bot Blocker project found a “MAGA account” that, according to X, was linked only to the U.S. but posted a tweet in Chinese (likely operated through a VPN). Some posts even contained leftover fragments of the neural network’s replies to the operator.
  
  

Accounts belonging to the same network also copy one another’s biographies and demographic details. For example, one such network consists of seven “French men who moved to the United States,” all aged 40-41. The new X feature shows that all of these accounts are registered in Thailand.

Notably, 15 accounts from the “Vietnamese network” are ostensibly verified, which further demonstrates that selling “blue checkmarks” does not help distinguish real accounts from bots, despite promises from the platform’s owner Elon Musk.

Bot Blocker has also found more than 200 accounts posing as young, attractive women supporting Trump. These accounts share traits that point to their inauthenticity: photos of the same women (including Russian models and actresses) are used across multiple accounts. In other cases, however, certain accounts present photos of several different people as the user's portraits.

“Almost all of their activity consists of copycat phrases, designed to provoke reactions or comments,” analysts evaluating the fake accounts say.

Notably, in late summer to early fall of this year, accounts in the network posted photos of young women with captions such as, “I think my smile is prettier than the liberals’ smiles.” In other tweets, the women ask readers to like or comment if they “love their country, family, and Jesus” or “raise our flag with us.”