Elon Musk’s X rolls out a feature that shows users’ country of origin — and then suddenly removes it
If you were using Elon Musk’s x backstage on Friday night, you may have seen a new, highly anticipated product release.
IX Visitors were able to go to any user profile page, click on their date to join a new view “about this account page revealed which country the account is based in which country. This information is different from the usual “location” information on the X profile page, because it shows exactly where the account was posting based on their IP address, not the user’s own input.
Grok produces the sycophantic praise of Elon Musk after the new update
The country of origin disclosure was widely praised among the X user base. Then, suddenly, without comment, the real world was removed from “About this account” in the local hours after the time of the late night light.
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– Hey corn last month when the feature was on the way. X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, initially teased the feature, rolling it out on his account as a demo of how it worked before it appeared on any other X user accounts.
It’s not clear why x quickly removed this feature shortly after it was rolled out to the public. However, Bier responded to X users who were reporting that “in this case” they were showing incorrect information, which may be the reason for the decline.
Bright light speed
Another X User named “Canadian Beaver” shared that their country of origin appeared as the United States despite living in Canada.
“Fixing this now,” he said answered. “Looks like the starlink turned us off.”
Along with the current country of origin, the “about this page” also shows where the user lives when they first create an account. Another X user reported that their join location was incorrectly displayed as korea.
“We identified the problem: It looks like you used a vpn to register your account in ’22,” bier said to that user.
Based on bier’s responses, it seems that X may have removed the feature to fix the inaccurate location caused by the VPN, and the intention is to re-deploy the feature in the coming days.
X users largely welcomed the country’s first feature, as many felt it would discourage outside actors from spreading falsehoods and propaganda related to political discussions on the platform. Facebook has a similar feature for Facebook pages, where users can view the country of origin of the page administrators, although Facebook does not reveal the profiles behind the pages.
We’ll find out soon if Musk Media Fit fort brings back the feature.
