Too casually, X tells us how Beijing is spamming Chinese users | The Strategist
Last week X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, made an allegation of enormous consequence with remarkable casualness: China controls millions of spam accounts used to censor the platform during periods of political unrest. Responding publicly to user complaints that Chinese-language search on X had become unusable, Bier alleged that the Chinese government flooded the platform with pornographic advertising content during periods of political unrest, deliberately drowning out real-time information. He added that X believed Beijing controlled a pool of 5 million to 10 million accounts, created before the company tightened sign-up controls. Such a pool would give Beijing a ready-made capability to manipulate search results at scale. It was a striking claim, not only because of its scale but because of how it arrived—not via a transparency report, technical briefing, or regulatory filing, but in a reply post. For many Chinese-language users, it marked the moment when a daily experience of interference, long suspected to be state-directed, was acknowledged by the platform itself. We should not have to rely on the occasional tweet from X executives, however candid, to understand how one of the world’s most important information ecosystems is being manipulated. Casual executive pronouncements are replacing formal transparency mechanisms—a
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