X wants to eliminate bots again, with the platform’s Head of Product Nikita Bier confirming that his team has been conducting a major bot purge over the past week.
On April 9, Bier said that X was identifying and suspending 208 bot accounts per minute.
Last month, Bier announced that the majority of his team was working on spam mitigation features, including bot detection and removal approaches, in order to reduce the amount of bot activity in the app.
Bier has been warning about this for some time and said the development of artificial intelligence tools will make bots harder and harder to detect. He added that all social platforms need to be working on this in order to get ahead of a massive bot surge that could eventually overwhelm human activity.
Bier oversaw several initiatives designed to address this at X. In October, he announced that X had removed 1.7 million bots that had been engaging in reply spam, with this latest initiative set to ban even more bot accounts from the app.
Bot activity became a key focus as part of Elon Musk’s takeover of the app in 2022. Musk even tried to get out of his $44 billion takeover offer for Twitter because he said the company had severely underreported its bot count.
As part of his team’s due diligence on Twitter ahead of the purchase, Musk’s team said they found, through their own sampling, that around 33% of profiles in the app were actually bots, and therefore of no value as ad targets, thus reducing the platform’s revenue potential. Twitter had long held that the number of fake profiles in the app didn’t exceed 5% of its total mDAU count, but Musk claimed that the deal could not go ahead until Twitter proved its numbers.
The deal went through anyway, but Musk made it a focus to “get rid of the spam bots or die trying” to restore trust and integrity in the app.
Yet, since then, and despite Musk’s various proclamations that his team had defeated bots entirely, independent analysis showed that the platform’s bot issues have actually worsened, and have made X a key platform for the dissemination of misinformation.
In 2023, the University of Queensland in Australia released a report that analyzed bot activity on X surrounding the first U.S. Republican presidential primary debate that year. The report found that “X is flooded with platform manipulation of various kinds, is not doing enough to moderate content, and has no clear strategy for dealing with political disinformation.”
Also in 2023, European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova identified X as having the “largest ratio of mis/disinformation posts” among major platforms, following a study on the platform’s role in spreading disinformation.
So while Musk has claimed that X has addressed its bot issues, external reports suggest the opposite. And given that Musk also cut 80% of the company’s staff after taking over, including most of its moderation team, it makes sense that X would have worsening bot problems, and that the app would be facing challenges in effectively addressing them.
Maybe this latest push, led by Bier, will have a more significant impact because it’s using advanced detection tools and processes to clean up the app.
The importance of taking action right now is also pressing, given that X itself has acknowledged the use of its platform to spread misinformation about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
If X wants to maintain its place as the top platform for real-time discussion, this needs to be a major focus.
