Vitalik: The "Show Account Country" feature on platform X will only bring short-term positive effects.

On November 24, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared his thoughts on the feature of “displaying the country of the account owner”: in the short term, it will bring many positive effects. In the medium term, experienced players will find ways to disguise themselves as if they are not in their actual country. There are countless ways to rent someone else's passport, phone number, IP address, etc. It will be somewhat difficult to forge 1 million accounts with fake locations, but it will be very easy to create one fake location account and then grow it to 1 million followers. Six months later, political bot accounts that are actually located in some random Eurasian country, but operate under names like “defending Western civilization,” will likely have their location tags changed to “United States” or “United Kingdom.” (The above is what I think will happen, not what I hope to see as a result. What I hope for is: (i) that we can truly see different communities' views on different issues, and this is not an easily forged signal (ii). These “communities” are not just narrow labels like country or education level that are highly recognizable, but broader, more spontaneous structures composed of multi-source evidence. However, I believe that keeping such a system robust in an adversarial environment is very difficult.) After further reflection, I also agree with the responders' views: displaying the user's country without user consent and without any option to opt-out (not even the “deactivate account” as a last resort) is wrong. In most cases, displaying country information will still retain a large anonymous pool, but there are indeed some individuals for whom even a few bits of data leakage can be very dangerous, and they should not be deprived of privacy by the platform in a reverse manner without any remedy.