It’s 5 a.m. on a Sunday, and I have just learned that my favorite Simpsons meme account, which seems to have an intimate understanding of American culture, is in fact based in Argentina.
That’s because on Friday, the head of product at X, Nikita Bier, made good on a promise to start displaying which country a user is posting from—and Criminal Simpsons was outed as a foreigner. The aim of the new X feature, according to Bier, is to help users “verify” the “authenticity” of content.
“This is an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square,” he stated.
This is indeed important, because as we found out over the weekend, it’s not just Simpsons stan accounts that are based abroad. It’s also a lot of American-looking right-wing meme accounts—many based in poor countries like India and Pakistan, as many have long speculated. There’s an America First account that’s based in Bangladesh. There’s an Ivanka Trump stan account with a million followers that’s based in Nigeria.
