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US ‘Homeland Security’ Twitter account seemingly run from Israel

Recently, Elon Musk announced that his Twitter/X platform would be revealing the location data that every user posts from. People have anticipated this day for some time, as they suspected many far-right accounts are actually foreign individuals cosplaying as Western reactionaries to farm clicks:


Now, people are starting to see the location data, and as expected, many of the site’s most prominent far-right nationalists are actually international grifters:

And as we’ll get to, one of the exposed accounts was reportedly the US Department of Homeland Security.

Chaos with Twitter location data

The accounts exposed via the Twitter location data update so far include the following:



The Right Wing Cope account published a ‘heat map’:


Many have reported that Twitter ‘paused’ or ‘ended’ the programme:

It was difficult to prove this, as Twitter is incredibly buggy, so sometimes different people have different user experiences. At the same time, the feature is back online for most.

‘Home’ land

There’s no way Musk didn’t know the Twitter location data update would expose right-wing grifter accounts. Saying that, he probably didn’t expect it to expose the US government:

While many didn’t find the situation funny, the (alleged) Israelis running the Homeland Security account are not among them:


The account data now says they’re based in the United States, but it has a circled ‘i’ next to it (what some people are describing as an ‘exclamation point’):

As people have highlighted, the symbol signifies that the account is using a VPN to hide their actual location:

Wild times

Fair play to Elon Musk, this change to his social media site is actually a positive one. Does it make up for his years of negative choices? Not even slightly, but it has at least exposed some of the worst people on the website.

Featured image via Daniel Oberhaus (Flickr) / Public Domain

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.