Causal effect of location transparency on account suspension

Establish whether the introduction of X’s “About this account” location-transparency feature increases the probability that location-mismatched accounts are suspended by the platform, using enforcement records with sufficiently fine temporal resolution to identify the timing of suspensions relative to the disclosure intervention.

Background

The study finds that location-mismatched accounts are suspended more often than location-matched accounts in the observed data, but the available X API does not report the exact timing of account sanctions. Consequently, the authors cannot determine whether suspensions occurred before or after the location-transparency intervention, preventing a causal assessment of whether disclosure itself increased suspension risk.

The unresolved issue matters because the observed decline in posting activity among location-mismatched accounts could reflect not only voluntary behavioral restraint or reduced economic value, but also platform enforcement triggered by the disclosure. The authors therefore identify finer-grained enforcement records and temporal data around the intervention as necessary for distinguishing these mechanisms.

References

Given that X's API does not return the exact timestamps for the account suspensions, we cannot directly measure the potential effect of location transparency on the suspension by the platform. Alternatively, we further analyse the ratios of suspended/protected/deleted accounts from which the posts were successfully collected during the post collection (i.e., these accounts were deleted/suspended/protected after the location disclosure), relative to the total accounts with corresponding status. \Cref{fig:account_status}b indicates that accounts in the control group are more likely to be deleted or protected (0.5 and 0.786, respectively) after the location transparency compared to the accounts in the treatment group (0.357 and 0.545, respectively), while there is only a tiny difference in suspended accounts (0.5 in the control group vs. 0.504 in the treatment group). However, this does not necessarily mean that the implementation of transparency feature has no effect on account suspension by the platform, as we collected the dataset weeks after the implementation of transparency feature. We advocate for future research to investigate the causal effect of location transparency on account suspension by collecting data with finer temporal resolution around the time of the transparency intervention.

— Location transparency reduces activity by accounts misrepresenting their location on X  (2609.25933 - Chuai et al., 22 Sep 2026) in Supplementary Materials, Section S5.6 “Analysis of account status” (label supp:account_status); also discussed in the main text, Results, subsection “Impact of location transparency,” and Discussion