X is conducting its largest bot purge to date, with Head of Product Nikita Bier confirming on April 9 that the platform is identifying and suspending 208 bot accounts per minute. The operation has been running for roughly a week and follows months of internal work by Bier’s team on spam mitigation and bot detection.
Bier announced in March that the majority of his team was focused on building spam mitigation features, including improved bot detection and removal systems. He has repeatedly warned that the development of AI tools is making bots harder to detect and that all social platforms need to get ahead of what he describes as a potential bot surge that could eventually overwhelm human activity on these platforms.
This is not the first major bot removal operation under Bier’s leadership.
In October 2025, he announced that X had removed 1.7 million bots that had been engaging in reply spam. The current operation appears to be significantly larger in scope based on the rate of account suspensions.
Bot activity has been a central issue for X since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Musk attempted to exit the deal over what he claimed was a severe underreporting of bot accounts. His team’s due diligence sampling suggested that approximately 33% of profiles on the platform were bots, far higher than Twitter’s long-standing claim that fake accounts represented less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users. The deal ultimately went through, and Musk pledged to “get rid of the spam bots or die trying.”
Despite repeated claims from Musk that his team had defeated the bot problem, independent analysis has consistently shown that bot activity on X worsened after the acquisition. A 2023 report from the University of Queensland in Australia analyzed bot behaviour on the platform and found that automated accounts remained a significant problem, particularly in the spread of misinformation. The reduction in content moderation staff following Musk’s takeover, combined with changes to the platform’s verification system that allowed anyone to purchase a blue checkmark, created new avenues for bot operators to gain credibility and reach.
The current purge under Bier represents a more systematic approach. Rather than one-off removal events, Bier’s team appears to be building ongoing detection infrastructure designed to identify and suspend bot accounts at scale in real time. The 208-per-minute rate, if sustained, would translate to roughly 300,000 accounts removed per day.
Bot activity on social platforms has intensified during the US-Iran conflict, with automated accounts amplifying misinformation, propaganda and engagement bait across X, Facebook and other platforms. The timing of X’s purge during this period of heightened geopolitical tension is notable, though the company has not explicitly linked the two.
For users, the practical effect of the purge is likely to be a drop in follower counts for some accounts, particularly those that had accumulated bot followers over time.
However, many also took to X to complain that they have wrongfully been affected by this purge. As a user wrote under Bier’s tweet:
X has not announced any changes to how it communicates account suspensions to affected users, or whether they can appeal the suspension in any way.
