All major social media platforms in China were ordered by law to reveal IP location (just the cities) of their users since April 2022 because a lot of anti-Russia comments were made by Taiwanese trolls when the war in Ukraine started.

Most Chinese people are Russia simps and the social media fights got really ugly flamed by trolls, so they decided to just reveal the IP location of the users instead.

[–] coolusername@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

i'm in taiwan and it says 中國臺灣
doesn't make a difference to me

it's just an ip lookup

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 18 points 2 weeks ago

It tells people you’re posting from Taiwan, which will earn you extra mockery when people see that

[–] Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 2 weeks ago

For me it just says Poland but in Chinese

[–] axont@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

How well would this even work given how many Chinese people use VPNs

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 18 points 2 weeks ago

I don’t think many people use VPN at all. You only need it to bypass the firewall to browse certain foreign websites. Only a small fraction of people does that.

But it is true that it would not be very effective against determined trolls posting from, say, Taiwan, because they can simply use VPN servers located inside China. Without showing the IP location, people will just endlessly accuse one another for being Taiwanese trolls without any proof. Surprisingly the flame wars did tone down substantially after this was introduced.