X to display username change history and base country, testing starts next week

An experiment to display additional information on X profiles, such as the account’s base country, connection source, and username change history, will begin next week.

X to display username change history and an account’s base country

Nikita Bier, X’s Head of Product, announced on his X account that the platform will start an experiment to display additional information on profiles, including the account’s base country, connection source, and username change history.

Starting next week, the information will appear on some X employees’ profiles to collect feedback.

Bier stated, “When you read content on X, you should be able to verify its authenticity. This is critical to getting a pulse on important issues happening in the world,” emphasizing the need to display additional information such as the account’s base country.

In the image Bier posted, the profile shows the account creation date, the country the account is based in, the username change history, and the connection source.

As for the username change history, it displays the number of changes and the most recent update date, but it is unclear whether past usernames can be viewed.

For the connection source (Connected via), it shows “United States App Store”, which appears to indicate the country and app store where the app was installed.

The feature to display additional account information will be tested on some X employees’ accounts starting next week.

The timing for rollout to general users is unknown.

What are the effects of displaying additional account information?

X is strengthening measures against spam and bots, and according to Bier, it deleted as many as 1.7 million bots replying with spam just last week.

On social media, spam and influence operations using bots are a problem. The Japanese government has stated that there are international cases “influence operations such as involving the spread of disinformation” and has indicated its recognition that “our country is also the target of such influence operations.”

By advancing efforts to increase account transparency, such as displaying the account’s base country, X may help curb influence operations by foreign actors.

Possible methods for determining an account’s base country include: 1. using the existing country setting in X’s settings, 2. inferring from IP addresses, and 3. obtaining the device’s location information.

It is unknown which method X will use, but 1 can be changed by the user, 2 can produce incorrect estimates, and 3 cannot be used unless the user grants access to location information.

X supports location-based ad targeting, which predicts location using machine learning models from multiple signals such as recent IP addresses and GPS.

It may estimate the base country using a similar method.

While displaying additional account information improves transparency on X, it also raises privacy issues.

I consider displaying the base country instead of detailed location information to strike a balance between ensuring transparency and protecting privacy.

It is unclear whether past usernames will be viewable in the username change history. If they are, there is concern that a user’s past, which they may wish to keep private for privacy reasons, could be exposed.

References

• Post by Nikita Bier