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Justin Diego doesn\u2019t<\/span> typically avoid the spotlight.<\/p>\n He\u2019s a celebrity news influencer with 617,000 combined followers across YouTube and Instagram. So when he created a secret account on X in 2024 to keep track of his favorite OnlyFans creators, he appreciated the anonymity it provided him outside of his main accounts.<\/p>\n Diego primarily used the burner account to bookmark and like solo content and masturbation videos, and never posted. But when he logged in to X over the weekend, he was notified that the account had been suspended.<\/p>\n Beginning this month, X has escalated its efforts to crack down on automated accounts. The company\u2019s head of product, Nikita Bier, noted that the platform was flagging and suspending bots at a rapid pace\u2014\u201c208 bots per minute and growing,\u201d he posted on April 9. But the large-scale campaign, which is intended to remove fake, inactive, or spam accounts in bulk, has also led to the suspension and deletion of accounts used by humans\u2014including many used to privately curate niche porn.<\/p>\n The company has a policy against \u201cinauthentic activity that undermines the integrity of X,\u201d meaning private accounts that people used to repost or lurk were likely identified as spam trying to juice engagement.<\/p>\n While it is unclear how many actual bots have been wiped from the platform since early April\u2014X did not respond to multiple requests for comment\u2014the purge has been catastrophic for users who have long used their secret accounts, commonly called \u201calts,\u201d to watch and archive their favorite porn. (My alt account, which I created in 2021 during the height of the pandemic, was also nuked over the weekend).<\/p>\n \u201cNot a single rule was violated mind you, years of curation and accumulation gone in a flash for no reason,\u201d posted Tom Zohar, an actor based in San Diego. \u201cThe burning of the library of Alexandria\u2019s got nothing on this tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c6 yr old goon acc is suspended this cannot be real,\u201d wrote another user.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes people just need a page that\u2019s specifically for them to engage with content they don\u2019t want other people to know they\u2019re into. That doesn’t make you a bot; that makes you human, actually,\u201d Diego tells WIRED.<\/p>\n