X creators lose thousands of followers amid recent bot purge and spam moderation

Are you losing a lot of followers on X? You’re not alone. Some accounts have reportedly lost over 20,000 followers out of nowhere. The loss of followers seems to be directly linked to the recent bot purge on the platform. A few accounts even lost 4000+ followers in a few days.

The product head of X, Nikita Bier, announced through a reply on X in March that more than half the product team is actively engaged in mitigating spam. These features would launch sometime in April. It appears that the mass suspensions of bot accounts on X began a few days ago. Today, Bier posted “Pour one out for the reply bots,” and also claimed that around 208 bot accounts are being suspended per minute.

Accounts that X believes are bots are being suspended on a whim. A few posts claim that many followers are being lost, but verified followers are going up. This suggests that a vast majority of bots might actually be on the way out. However, it appears that several genuine accounts have also been caught in this frenzy.

A Forbes article claims that biometric tools are a good way of verifying whether a user is a bot, and OpenAI is developing a platform where only real humans are allowed. This is believed to be in direct response to the bot problem on X. Sam Altman previously commented that bots make social media feel “fake.”

A lot of creators who had communities are reporting that they’ve been suspended. The problem with the mass-suspension is that alt accounts, NSFW accounts, and accounts that mostly have Reposts have all been grouped under bots. You can find several reports about that here, here, and here.

If you’re relying on your analytics page to gauge your follower count, it might not be very reliable. It directly removes the followers from there, but does not come under “unfollows.”

Nikita Bier joked about this, saying, “Christmas came early.” If you lost several followers, the reason is that they’re all suspended accounts now. From what I’m seeing, the appeals don’t really work. If your account was unfairly suspended, you can still try to contact X Support. However, do not expect a response, since they either take too long or close the ticket with no valid reason for suspension.

Instead of the traditional e-mail support route, X seems to be trying another method, and that’s FaceID authentication. The reply from Nikita says that accounts that were auto-suspended for spam can use FaceID to verify themselves as legitimate users. If your device doesn’t support FaceID, there’s the option for Amazon Live Feed through your front camera. However, it’s worth noting that this feature is still under consideration, and the phrasing from Nikita suggests no guarantee about the release.

I also don’t think it’s possible to design a mass-suspension campaign of bots without some genuine accounts being caught up in the mix. Automation is always bound to make a few errors. I’d suggest keeping your accounts updated, avoiding spam-like behavior, and trying to post a bit more actively. That should keep it safe from suspensions such as this in the future.

X is also working on various new features. Recently, Voice Notes were released on XChat. You can read about that here. Another feature that was recently introduced is auto-translation of posts through Grok.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.