X’s bot crackdown accidentally deleted many users’ private accounts used to secretly follow porn creators, causing outrage among longtime users.
San Francisco: Justin Diego is a celebrity news person with many followers on YouTube and Instagram. When he made a secret account on X in 2024 to follow his favorite OnlyFans creators, he liked the privacy it gave him.
Diego mainly used this hidden account to save and like solo videos and masturbation content. He never posted anything himself. But when he checked X over the weekend, he got a message saying his account was gone.
Beginning this month, X started removing more fake accounts from its platform. The company’s product leader, Nikita Bier, said they were finding and removing 208 fake accounts per minute. This big cleanup was meant to take away fake, empty, or spam accounts all at once.
But the sweep also removed accounts used by real people like Diego. Many of these were accounts people used to quietly collect special porn content. The company has rules against fake activity that hurts the platform’s trust. That means private accounts people used to share or watch content were likely seen as spam trying to fool the system.
It’s not clear how many fake accounts have been removed since early April. X did not answer questions about this. But the cleanup has been very bad for users who long used their secret accounts, often called “alts,” to watch and save their favorite porn.
Some users lost accounts they had for years. They had saved lots of content and built collections over time. One person from San Diego said this was like burning down the Library of Alexandria. Users were sad to lose these personal spaces where they could explore content privately.
X has done these sweeps before. In October, they removed 1.7 million fake accounts to cut down on spam replies. In the weeks before April, the company said almost half their product team worked on making X better at stopping spam. They focused on finding bots and using automatic systems to remove them.