发表机构
University of Luxembourg; Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford; Université Paris-Saclay; Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cornell University（卢森堡大学; 牛津大学牛津互联网研究所; 巴黎萨克雷大学; 麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院; 康奈尔大学）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本研究利用X的“关于此账户”功能，通过准实验发现位置披露使虚报位置的账户发帖活动减少13.1%，主要机制是账户自我克制而非观众行为改变。
AI 中文摘要
关于不真实账户（包括伪装成本地声音的外国行为者）的担忧，是在线话语辩论的核心。然而，对于位置声明不准确的账户，以及当它们声明的位置与实际位置之间的差异公开可见时它们如何表现，人们知之甚少。2025年11月，X推出了“关于此账户”功能，该功能披露每个账户的平台推断运营位置。我们利用这一干预措施，进行了一项大规模准实验研究，涉及8,200个声称位于美国的政治参与账户，比较了披露位置与声明相符和相矛盾的账户，覆盖了21周内的130万条帖子和360万条回复。在披露之前，位置不匹配的账户发布了更多误导性、诈骗相关和加密货币相关的内容，但没有表现出明显的党派倾向。双重差分估计显示，披露使位置不匹配账户的发帖活动减少了13.1%，其中在非洲（29.2%）和亚洲（24.4%）的账户降幅最大，以及带有VPN标志、用户名更改或诈骗和加密货币内容较多的账户降幅也较大。此外，它们回复的减少集中在美国接收者的互动中（10.3%），而对非美国接收者的回复没有统计学显著变化。相反，观众对其帖子的平均参与度没有显著变化。因此，位置透明度主要通过促使被披露账户自我克制来起作用，而不是通过改变观众行为，而且它所约束的账户看起来更像是跨境欺诈，而非外国政治影响。
英文摘要
Concerns about inauthentic accounts, including foreign actors posing as domestic voices, are central to debates about online discourse. Yet, little is known about accounts with inaccurate location claims and how they behave when discrepancies between their claimed and actual locations become publicly visible. In November 2025, X introduced an "About this account" feature that discloses each account's platform-inferred location of operation. We leverage this intervention in a large-scale quasi-experimental study of 8,200 politically engaged accounts claiming a U.S. location, comparing accounts whose disclosed locations matched versus contradicted their claims across 1.3 million posts and 3.6 million replies over 21 weeks. Before disclosure, location-mismatched accounts posted more misleading, scam-related, and cryptocurrency-related content, but showed no distinctive partisan leaning. Difference-in-differences estimates show that disclosure reduced the posting activity of location-mismatched accounts by 13.1% with the largest declines among accounts revealed to be in Africa (29.2%) and Asia (24.4%), and among accounts with VPN flags, username changes, or scam- and crypto-heavy content. Additionally, the decline in their replies was concentrated in interactions with U.S.-based recipients (10.3%), whereas replies to non-U.S.-based recipients showed no statistically significant change. Conversely, there was no significant change in average audience engagement with their posts. Location transparency thus works primarily by inducing restraint among the disclosed accounts rather than by shifting audience behaviour, and the accounts it constrains look at least as much like cross-border fraud as foreign political influence.
