Comment by jmyeet

Given the climate, I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I'd say that broadly there are two groups of inauthentic actors online:

1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and

2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper.

Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1].

So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem.

Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency.

So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content.

There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink).

You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police.

It feels like a solvable problem.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar...

[2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...