X disclosed to the United Kingdom’s Members of Parliament that it had temporarily deactivated 800 million accounts in an effort to counteract coordinated state-sponsored activities on its platform, as reported by The Guardian. Wifredo Fernández, X’s senior executive for global government relations, shared this information during a virtual session with officials from the foreign affairs committee. According to him, these account deactivations occurred over a 12-month span in 2024 and were carried out due to violations related to platform manipulation and spamming practices. The majority of these accounts were linked to Russian state-backed operations, followed by similar efforts from Chinese and Iranian actors.
According to Fernández, the Russian accounts were engaged in activities aimed at inciting societal division and promoting specific narratives designed to influence the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. During the video call, he emphasized that such attempts to interfere with discourse and generate spam are ongoing. “There are daily efforts to establish networks of fake accounts,” he stated. Additionally, X reportedly suspended several hundred million more accounts in the previous year, likely due to similar foreign state-sponsored interference campaigns.
It is worth noting that Statista estimates the user base of X to be around 429 million as of early 2024. The Guardian also reports that the platform has approximately 300 million monthly active users globally.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/x-says-it-suspended-800-million-accounts-in-2024-over-spam-and-manipulation-123000201.html?src=rss