X is going through a flurry of changes right now. Most of these have been credited to the site’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, who has suddenly become a main character among the racists, trolls, and CEOs that still use the platform. And the bulk of the changes are focused on managing the very specific issues caused by those aforementioned power users. But it mainly boils down to a question of who gets to dox and who gets to be doxxed.

On Tuesday, Bier announced that the platform plans to start displaying what country a user is posting from — which you could argue is a light form of doxxing, itself — among other identifying information for all accounts on the site, such as the device the account posts from, as well as all previous usernames the account has used. Bier noted users could opt out of displaying the information, but that the site also would “likely” say they had chosen to keep it private. X users seem largely excited about this, though mostly because they’re racist and paranoid and accuse anyone they don’t agree with of being secretly Indian.

But assuming the changes roll out site-wide, they have the potential to change quite a lot about how we think about X. Bier says the changes are to help users “form judgements on authenticity” — in other words, you might finally know if the account you’re looking at is a bot. Which was a problem for Twitter long before Elon purchased it and renamed it (and then tried to back out of the deal by claiming there were too many bots). Reports from Fast Company suggest coordinated manipulation by elaborate networks of fake accounts have only gotten worse in the year and a half since Mashable reported that over 75% of X engagement was inauthentic.

But all the attention that Bier has received recently for a range of similar technical tweaks, it’s also the reason he’s now become personally embroiled in some very intense drama with a group of X users we’re pretty sure are human. They’re also virulently hateful, gleefully white nationalist, committed doxxers… and several of them seem to be crucial voices in X’s new, mask-off extremist communities, and count Vice President JD Vance and Musk among their fans.

On Monday, X banned this group of far-right accounts, many of which were connected to the doxxing of the liberals that are still on the platform. The platform is seemingly trying to decide where the line is between an extremist that is bad for the site and an extremist that is good for the site. And the most prominent user in this group was an account going by the handle @avaricum777.

It was something of an open secret on X that @avaricum777 was run by a Canadian man named Geoff Martin. He’s been banned too many times to have a single consistent username, but he usually goes by some variation of “Captive Dreamer” online.

Earlier this year, Martin was first unmasked as Captive Dreamer by The Daily Dot, who found that he had been replied to by Musk and followed by Vance shortly after the election. A few months earlier, the Captive Dreamer account bragged that it was responsible for Vance repeating the “Haitians eating pets” hoax at his vice presidential debate. The @captivedreamer7 account was then suspended earlier this year. It’s since been taken over by someone who’s changed the display name to “Geoffrey Martin is a Pedophile Groyper.” But all of that hasn’t stopped Martin from apparently posting.

It’s hard to pin Martin down, thanks to the various accounts he appears to be switching between, but the @avaricum777 account links to the same Substack that The Daily Dot reported was initially linked to the @captivedreamer7 account. Avaricum, for the record, is a city that was conquered and massacred by Julius Caesar. Which also lines up with what The Daily Dot reported. Martin was apparently a classics major.

And Martin was ostensibly leading the network of X posters who have spent the last month in a frenzy thanks to the death of Charlie Kirk. Even before comments from Vance, Martin was using the shooting as an excuse to dox people. Two days after the shooting, cached records of X posts show that @avaricum777 encouraged his followers to dox anyone saying anything negative about Kirk. The same day, replies to @avaricum777 suggest he also reposted identifying information for another X user who was arguing with them about the news. These posts were later deleted, but not before it was spread by a network of fellow posters who have continued to violate X’s rules against doxxing as part of the larger campaign to silence any criticism of Kirk.

After the @avaricum777 account was banned this week, there was a surge of outrage from huge far-right accounts such as Mike Cernovich and Patrick Casey, former leader of the white nationalist group American Identity Movement. As the ban was unfolding, Martin still had access to parts of his account, and started an X Space where he joked that his “kid crying in the background adds ambience.” Hours later, a new account called @margbaroma5881 posted a video of a man who appeared to be Martin, asking, “Is this the free speech app?”

Which is where Bier comes back into the story. Since he’s been so public with his recent tweaks and fixes to the platform, he’s being blamed for suspending Martin earlier this week, as well as several other members of Martin’s network. It’s unclear whether or not Bier is actually responsible for the suspensions, though a user who claimed to have been doxxed by Martin also claimed to have spoken to Bier privately about it. Meanwhile, Musk himself hasn’t directly commented on the suspension, but responded to a different user who claimed to have been suspended by Bier. As of Tuesday, the @avaricum777 account is back on X, and is crediting advocacy from Milo Yiannopoulos for pushing it through. The account spent yesterday excitedly posting about the Department of Homeland Security using genuine Nazi language in an X post.

All of this should give you a snapshot of the current state of the Everything App. Whether or not Bier is responsible for banning these accounts, his efforts to improve user experience in general show that X needs to at least try to care about their users. Even in an age of enshittification, and a time when the US government is attempting to use social media as both a primary tool of oppression and a suggestion box for new ways to do it, the platforms themselves can’t afford to make its own real human users into the enemy. But the site also can’t exist solely on the engagement of their mega-racist core audience. And if the team running X does try and crack down in any meaningful way, the site’s owner seems to be happy interceding to lift bans for people who make illegal, harmful posts — something Musk has already done multiple times.

Managing all of this is complicated even further by the behavior of X accounts for official branches of the US government. Like the State Department, which posted a sprawling thread posted yesterday, listing “foreigners” that were deported or had their visas revoked for wishing “death on Americans.” It’s a collection of low-level accounts that were doxxed for posts that were critical of Charlie Kirk in the days after he was murdered. And, yes, far-right users on X are now celebrating that it was their doxxing on the platform that led to the deportations. The final stage of LOLgislation, where any deranged X post can turn into actual government policy and real-life human cruelty.

Most of the other accounts banned earlier this week have remained suspended, except for one — another relatively prominent account with the handle @Anarseldain and the display name “Sólionath.” It does not appear to be run by Martin, for what it’s worth. And if that username looks like some Lord of the Rings bullshit, you’re exactly right, with emphasis on the bullshit.

Curulócë, a member of a Discord server called “Vinyë Lambengolmor” focused on JRR Tolkien’s invented languages, helped Garbage Day translate it. They say that “Anarseldain” and “Sólionath” seem to be trying to say “daughters of the sun” and “sons of the helmet” respectively, but that both of these words are “erroneous combinations of Quenya and Sindarin” — two completely different languages that Tolkien writes were spoken thousands of years apart. Whoever runs the account should have come correct, since alongside white nationalism and supporting incest, a major theme of their posts is wanting to fuck elves.

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s salt daddy.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***