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X purges 13,000 accounts linked to suspected meddling ahead of US midterms

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/15/x-purges-13000-accounts-linked-to-suspected-meddling-ahead-of-us-midterms/5303234
41•ilreb•49m ago

Comments

gvfsa•35m ago
>...as well as content intended to discourage participation.

Uh? That's odd. In my country I don't vote because I don't feel represented and I encourage others in my situation to do the same. Would I get banned for saying that?

boesboes•28m ago
Are you a bot from an openly hostile nation? If not, then probably not. But maybe you've already been successfully brain washed, because that's EXACTLY what countries do to undermine each other
gvfsa•19m ago
No, I read the policy and it doesn't cover what I mentioned. It looks like "content intended to discourage participation" is probably not the best wording...

https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-...

knottn•10m ago
Getting idiots to not vote undermines elections? Weird.
causesothere•7m ago
Yes. Building apathy erodes democracy.
nozzlegear•4m ago
[delayed]
ChrisRR•3m ago
Why would you get banned for saying that? What a pointlessly argumentative comment
brodouevencode•34m ago
Reminder that Twitter (X) has done similar things (shadow-banning) before.
causesothere•8m ago
HN does too. It's a standard moderation practice.
lawn•30m ago
Knowing Musk, they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone.
boesboes•28m ago
true, luckily they're mostly offline since yandex gone boom
gruez•19m ago
There's no evidence of that happening. In fact there's counter-evidence:

https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3m...

233mhz•14m ago
People keep saying this with 0 proof other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard
nozzlegear•6m ago
[delayed]
mingus88•26m ago
What a blow to Elon to lose his account in his own platform
olooney•26m ago
Twitter over 300 million daily active users. 13,000 is 0.004% of that.

A standard drop of water is 0.05 ml. A standard household bucket is about 3 gallons. So the proverbial "drop in the bucket" is 0.0004%.

So, for all you naysayers out there saying this is just a drop in the bucket, it's literally x10 that.

Why, if they could get this up to a repeatable process and ban 13,000 accounts per day, that would be 1.5% every year. After a couple of years of work, that might even be perceptible to the average user. Sounds like the problem is well in hand.

piva00•23m ago
Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.

Not sure why number of accounts matter at all, even more if you are depending on internal Twitter investigations to determine that without knowing any of the methodology to detect those, etc.

But sure, you can always defend Twitter if that's the hill you want to die on.

gruez•21m ago
>Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.

I think it's fair to assume that if x.com refuses to provide stats that are easily obtainable for them (eg. views or followers), that those stats aren't favorable to them.

thatsabadlook•14m ago
This is the most contorted argument I have ever seen. I admire it on some level. Like we could be friends but I wouldn't let you watch my dogs
bliteben•
stetrain•25m ago
I'm sure this was done in a perfectly fair and balanced manner and not in a way that is at all aligned to the CEO's publicly stated politics.
dionian•14m ago
Just because it happened under Jack doesnt mean Elon will do it, like silencing americans for wrong opinions.
causesothere•10m ago
Elon has been pretty actively removing speech from X he disagrees with. Thats just objectively true.

And he's been obviously. And objectively deeply partisan outside of X. The OP's supposition that he'd be partisan on X in the run up to an election is a fair and reasonable one, independent of what Jack did.

edgyquant•8m ago
Examples? X is full of left wing politics so even if Elon has done the occasional censorship it’s nowhere near the scale that conservative voices were censored prior to 2022.
stetrain•6m ago
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/journalists-who-wrote-ab...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63999452

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-suspends-bot-acco...

voidhorse•25m ago
Meanwhile: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-midterms-republicans-do...

Manipulation of elections is OK as long as you do it with money.

bratsche•18m ago
Probably 13,000 accounts that suddenly went dark after Ukraine took out some datacenter in Russia recently.
thatsabadlook•16m ago
Doubtful... It looks like Starlink showed it's colors to Ukraine and it's admiration for the Russian state what was it within 24hrs of that operation? Yikes.
diath•3m ago
https://blog.cloudflare.com/yandex-outage/
feverzsj•10m ago
Posts on "For you" are mostly pro right/republican/Trump these days, even if you block such accounts frequently.
causesothere•5m ago
X is a deeply partisan website. It actively censors leftist viewpoints. So it's not surprising it would skew rightward.

This effect is self reinforcing, if you are leftish, and you are in a tightening space, why would you stay?

syngrog66•6m ago
meanwhile Musk spending $250M+ on Republican campaigns. but sure, ban a few Twitter accounts
8m ago
Yeah not sure I'd want to be around for his midlife crisis though.
greg7mdp•6m ago
Sometimes 0.004% matters when the population is not homogenous.

The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth. I would not be surprised if the 0.004% top X users in terms of followers have a majority of followers as well.

So implying that because 0.004% is a small proportion of total users, this user ban is unconsequential seems flawed to me.

theplumber•11m ago
I think most of Trump agenda(I.e anti immigration, anti trans/lgbtq+ policies) would not have survived on social media or at least on Twitter/x. It would have been marked as hatred, bigotry, racism etc so it doesn’t surprise me we now see the other side of the coin.

At some point it we may get balanced policies but we are still far from that as no party seems to want that yet.

baggachipz•3m ago
This is absolutely not a "both sides" thing. The owner of the network is spending record amounts of money on getting Republicans elected this cycle (and last). The idea that his social network would do anything counter to the whims of the CEO or his pal is utterly laughable.
a3w•3m ago
e.g. anti-anti-facism was missing, which is funniest use of "anti", and saddest for a POTUS.

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