X suspends 800m accounts in one year amid ‘massive’ scale of manipulation attempts

Elon Musk’s X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the “massive” scale of attempts to manipulate the platform.The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network, with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China.As part of the battle against such content, X suspended 800m accounts in 2024 for breaching its rules on platform manipulation and spam, although it did not reveal which of those suspensions related to foreign interference. X has approximately 300 million monthly users worldwide.Wifredo Fernández, a government affairs executive at the platform’s parent company, X Corp, said: “There are efforts every single day to create inauthentic networks of accounts.”Speaking to MPs on the foreign affairs committee via video link on Monday, Fernández said attempts to manipulate the platform or flood it with spam had not subsided and “several hundred million accounts” had been taken down in the latter part of last year as well. Fernández added he was “quite confident” that the remaining accounts on X were authentic.X defines manipulative accounts as those that engage in “bulk, aggressive or disruptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience”. It refers to spam as “unsolicited, repeated actions” that affect other accounts, often meaning a stream of low-quality content.Fernández said Russia sought to undermine the 2024 US presidential election and “stoke division”, with a large number of accounts attempting to “flood the zone” with a “particular type of narrative”.X has been criticised for its approach to content moderation since it was acquired by Musk, the world’s richest person, in 2022 when it was known as Twitter. In the UK, for instance, it helped spread inflammatory speculation in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings, in which three children were murdered by Axel Rudakubana.Spam accounts have been a particular bugbear for Musk, who used his concerns about the authenticity of accounts on the platform as one of the main reasons for attempting to back out of the 2022 takeover. The Tesla chief executive ultimately agreed to buy the platform amid warnings from experts that he could not drop the takeover without legal consequences.