Justin Diego doesn’t typically avoid the spotlight.
He’s a celebrity news influencer with 617,000 combined followers across YouTube and Instagram. So when he created a secret account on X in 2024 to keep track of his favorite OnlyFans creators, he appreciated the anonymity it provided him outside of his main accounts.
Diego primarily used the burner account to bookmark and like solo content and masturbation videos, and never posted. But when he logged in to X over the weekend, he was notified that the account had been suspended.
Beginning this month, X has escalated its efforts to crack down on automated accounts. The company’s head of product, Nikita Bier, noted that the platform was flagging and suspending bots at a rapid pace—“208 bots per minute and growing,” he posted on April 9. But the large-scale campaign, which is intended to remove fake, inactive, or spam accounts in bulk, has also led to the suspension and deletion of accounts used by humans—including many used to privately curate niche porn.
The company has a policy against “inauthentic activity that undermines the integrity of X,” meaning private accounts that people used to repost or lurk were likely identified as spam trying to juice engagement.
While it is unclear how many actual bots have been wiped from the platform since early April—X did not respond to multiple requests for comment—the purge has been catastrophic for users who have long used their secret accounts, commonly called “alts,” to watch and archive their favorite porn. (My alt account, which I created in 2021 during the height of the pandemic, was also nuked over the weekend).
“Not a single rule was violated mind you, years of curation and accumulation gone in a flash for no reason,” posted Tom Zohar, an actor based in San Diego. “The burning of the library of Alexandria’s got nothing on this tragedy.”
“6 yr old goon acc is suspended this cannot be real,” wrote another user.
“Sometimes people just need a page that’s specifically for them to engage with content they don’t want other people to know they’re into. That doesn’t make you a bot; that makes you human, actually,” Diego tells WIRED.
Though seemingly random, this most recent purge is part of an ongoing initiative by X. In October, Bier’s team scrubbed 1.7 million bots in an effort to reduce reply spam, with plans to focus on DM spam next. In the weeks leading up to April, Bier explained that “nearly half of the product team” had shifted its focus to improving X’s “spam mitigation features,” prioritizing bot detection systems and automated enforcement.
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