X’s Big Bot Purge Wiped Out a Lot of People’s Secret Porn Feeds

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. “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.” “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. But a shift to more automated moderation has drawn blowback from users. “Your overreliance on AI systems is not nearly as successful as you’d like to think it is,” wrote a user in a Change.org petition. X has struggled with moderation under Elon Musk’s ownership—he promised to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!”—as hate speech, harassment, and misinformation have surged on his watch. Even as X has failed to control bad actors, the platform has also been a crucial digital reservoir for consensual sexual media and queer education. “When social media platforms purge sexual content, queer and trans creators are always collateral damage,” says Alexander Monea, an associate professor at George Mason University. While some accounts have been reinstated, many more users have expressed outrage for being unexpectedly shut out of accounts they’d been building for years. “I actually am shocked, because I had a premium subscription. Wasn’t the whole point of paying for X to verify that you are human?” Diego says.