Prediction about this "show which country the account is from" thing:
In the short term it will have lots of positive effects.
In the medium term, the sophisticated actors will find ways to pretend to be from countries that they are not. Lots of ways to rent individual people's passports, phone numbers, IP addresses, etc. Getting a million accounts with fake location will be medium-hard, getting a single account with fake location, and then getting it to a million followers, will be easy.
In six months, the actually-[random Eurasian country]-based political troll accounts with names like "Defend Western Civilization" or whatever will all have "USA" or "UK" as their location tags.
(This is what I think will happen, not what I wish. What I wish is
(i) we do get more visibility into how people from different communities think about different issues, in a way that is not easy to spoof
(ii) the "communities" in question are not just a narrow set of highly legible credentials like countries, university degrees, etc, and are something broader and more emergent and combining evidence from many sources
But I think making such a system adversarially robust will not be easy)
Prediction Market
Expires May 24, 2026Will troll accounts fake USA/UK locations by May 2026?
Yes
57¢No
43¢