SAN DIEGO — X escalated its efforts to crack down on automated accounts beginning in April 2024, suspending and deleting fake, inactive, and spam accounts across the platform. The purge also swept up accounts operated by humans, including secret alternate accounts — known as "alts" — that users maintained to privately curate adult content.

The platform was flagging and suspending bots at a rate of 208 bots per minute and growing as of April 9, 2024, according to a post by tech entrepreneur Nikita Bier. In the weeks leading up to April 2024, nearly half of X's product team shifted focus to improving spam mitigation features, prioritizing bot detection systems and automated enforcement.

Among those caught in the sweep was celebrity news influencer Justin Diego, who has 617,000 combined followers across YouTube and Instagram. Diego created an alt account on X in 2021 to keep track of his favorite OnlyFans creators, using it to bookmark and like content. He never posted from the account. His alt was suspended during the April 2024 purge.

"I actually am shocked, because I had a premium subscription. Wasn't the whole point of paying for X to verify that you are human?" Diego said. He added: "Sometimes people just need a page that's specifically for them to engage with content they don't want other people to know they're into. That doesn't make you a bot; that makes you human, actually."

X's company policy prohibits inauthentic activity that undermines the platform's integrity. No official explanation was provided for why human-operated alt accounts used to curate adult content were included in the enforcement action.

Actor Tom Zohar also had an account affected. "Not a single rule was violated mind you, years of curation and accumulation gone in a flash for no reason," Zohar said.

Diego plans to continue to fight his suspension, but his appeals have been unsuccessful so far.