8/ location transparency works through the disclosed accounts, not their audiences. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2609.25933

7/ And the audience? Nothing. Reposts and replies per post were unchanged. X shows location on the profile page, not beside posts, so most readers never see it. Total engagement fell 14% — but only because the accounts posted less, not because readers turned away.

6/ Disclosure also changed whom they talk to. Replies from mismatched accounts to US-based users fell 10%; toxic replies to US users fell 18%. Replies to non-US users: no change. The restraint targets exactly the audience whose location they had claimed to share.

5/ Who pulls back most? VPN-flagged accounts (−26%), accounts with prior username changes (−22%), non-verified accounts (−21%), and accounts heavy on crypto and scam content. That looks more like operations losing their cover than general discomfort at being outed.

4/ The effect is far from uniform. Accounts revealed to be in Africa dropped 29.2%, Asia 24.4%. Europe, non-US North America, South America and Oceania: small or null. Where genuine relocation is plausible, little happens; where it isn't, activity falls sharply.

3/ Difference-in-differences over 21 weeks (1.3M posts, 3.6M replies): disclosure cut mismatched accounts' posting activity by 13.1%. Pre-trends are flat, and the effect holds under synthetic DiD, propensity score matching, daily-level estimates and X's own API counts.

2/ Before disclosure, mismatched accounts already looked different: newer, fewer followers, more username changes and VPN flags, and more scam, crypto and misleading content. But no partisan tilt — their left- and right-leaning shares matched those of US-based accounts.

New paper: In Nov 2025, X began showing where accounts actually operate from. We studied 8,200 politically engaged accounts claiming to be in the US half were revealed to be elsewhere What happened when the mismatch went public? @yuweichuai.bsky.social @thomasrenault.bsky.social @dgrand.bsky.social