If you were reading Elon Musk’s X late Friday night, you may have noticed a brand new, highly anticipated feature rolling out.
The This information differed from the normal “location” description on the X profile page, as it showed exactly where an account was posting from based on their IP address, not what was input by the user themselves.
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The country-of-origin disclosures were widely appreciated among X’s user base. Then, suddenly, without notice, the country of origin was removed from the “About this account” page late last night, just hours after its launch.
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Mashable informed This facility was supposed to come last month. Nikita Bear, head of product for X, originally teased the feature, introducing it on his account as a demo to show how it would work before it appeared on any other
It’s not exactly clear why X removed this feature so soon after introducing it to the public. However, Bear responded to some X users who were reporting that their “About this account” was showing incorrect information, which is probably why the feature was removed.
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An X user named “Canadian Beaver” shared that his country of origin is showing as the United States, despite living in Canada.
“Just fixing it,” Bear replied“Looks like Starlink dumped us,”
Along with the current country of origin, “About this page” also displays where the user lived when they first created the account. An X user reported that the location of his joining date was incorrectly displayed as Korea.
“We identified the problem: It looks like you used a VPN to register your account in ’22,” Bear told that user. “We’re adding an indicator to that line on Monday for Android and iOS – and it’ll be live on the web tomorrow.”
Based on Bear’s responses, it appears that X has removed the feature to fix location inaccuracies caused by VPNs, and intends to reintroduce the feature in the coming days.
X users mostly welcomed the country of origin feature, as many believed it would discourage foreign actors from spreading misinformation and propaganda related to political discussions on the platform. Facebook has a similar feature for Facebook Pages, where users can see the country of origin of the page’s administrators, although Facebook does not disclose the profiles behind the pages.
We’ll find out soon whether Musk’s social media platform restores this feature or not.