X’s Big Bot Purge Wiped Out a Lot of People’s Secret Porn Feeds
Justin Diego doesn’t do it generally avoid spotlights.
He is a celebrity influencer with 617,000 combined subscribers on YouTube and Instagram. So when he created a secret account on X in 2024 to follow his favorite OnlyFans creators, he appreciated the anonymity it gave him outside of his main accounts.
Diego primarily used the Burner account to favorite and like solo content and masturbation videos, and never posted. But when he logged into X this weekend, he was informed that his account had been suspended.
Since this month, X has stepped up its efforts to crack down on automated accounts. The company’s product manager, Nikita Bier, noted that the platform was reporting and suspending bots at a rapid rate – “208 bots per minute and growing,” he posted on April 9. But the large-scale campaign, which aims to remove fake, inactive or spam accounts en masse, has also led to the suspension and removal of accounts used by humans, many of which were used to privately run niche porn sites.
The company has a policy against “inauthentic activities that undermine the integrity of
While it’s unclear exactly how many 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 known as “alts,” to watch and archive their favorite porn. (My alt account, which I created in 2021 at the height of the pandemic, was also destroyed this weekend).
“Not a single rule was broken, years of preservation and accumulation were gone in a flash for no reason,” posted Tom Zohar, a San Diego-based actor. “The burning of the Alexandria library had nothing to do with this tragedy.”
“6 year old account is suspended, this can’t be real,” another user wrote.
“Sometimes people just need a page that’s specifically for them to engage with content that they don’t want others to know they’re in. That doesn’t make you a robot; it makes you human, actually,” Diego told WIRED.
While seemingly random, this most recent purge is part of an ongoing initiative by In the weeks leading up to April, Bier explained that “nearly half the product team” was focused on improving X’s “spam mitigation features,” prioritizing bot detection systems and automated enforcement.
