China Communist Party Used Porn Spam to Suppress Criticism on X

On January 30, 2026, an executive at X publicly accused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of orchestrating a large-scale campaign to flood Chinese-language searches on the platform with pornographic spam in order to suppress information about political unrest.

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, made the accusation after users complained that Chinese-language searches were effectively broken, overwhelmed by explicit content and illicit advertisements that made it difficult or impossible to find real-time news about protests and regional instability.

A similar tactic is deliberately deployed during periods of political unrest in China to suppress sensitive information and prevent citizens from accessing uncensored updates.

The operation relies on saturating search terms, hashtags, and filters with adult content and spam, a technique commonly referred to as porn spam.

Evidence suggests that the spam campaign was conducted at the CCP’s behest. Bier said the spam operation has been traced to a pool of approximately 5 to 10 million accounts.

These accounts appear to have been created years ago, before X implemented stricter controls on new account sign-ups, allowing them to evade modern bot-detection systems.

He acknowledged that the age and scale of these legacy accounts make the campaign particularly difficult to neutralize and described it as a serious technical challenge for the platform.

Users have also reported missing recent posts when using search filters, raising concerns about indexing, visibility, and the integrity of search results.

Bier emphasized that the challenge has grown more urgent as Chinese-speaking user activity on the platform increases, compounding the difficulty of filtering spam without suppressing legitimate content.

Similar behavior was documented in late 2022, when researchers and journalists observed suspected bot networks flooding Chinese-language searches with adult content and gambling ads during protests against China’s COVID-19 lockdown policies, including the White Paper protests, the largest demonstrations since Tiananmen Square.

The protests were named for the blank sheets of white paper held up by demonstrators, symbolizing what they were not allowed to say. Protesters explained the gesture as meaning, “We have so much to say, but we aren’t allowed to say anything.”

During the protests, internet access was restricted, slowed, or cut entirely across large parts of the country.

In both that period and during the more recent porn-spam operation, searches related to major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai were overwhelmed with escort advertisements and illicit links, effectively burying protest-related information.

The use of porn spam functions as a form of information displacement, designed to overwhelm targeted content rather than remove it outright. Unlike domestic platforms such as WeChat or Weibo, where authorities can simply delete posts, the Chinese government cannot directly censor content on X.

Instead, it floods the information space. By inundating hashtags such as #Beijing or #Urumqi with thousands of pornographic posts per minute, real-time updates from protesters become nearly impossible to locate.

Because X is banned in China, most users access the platform through VPNs, making it a rare channel for uncensored news but also a vulnerable one.

VPN connections are often slow and unstable, and when feeds are saturated with high-resolution images and videos of spam, the bandwidth required to find legitimate information increases sharply, frequently discouraging users from continuing their search.

The strategy also seeks to discredit the platform itself. By turning search results into a stream of illicit content, authorities aim to make X appear unusable and socially toxic.

Users repeatedly encountering pornography while searching for news may perceive the platform as unsafe or unreliable, reinforcing the state’s narrative that the global internet is chaotic and harmful.

At scale, the tactic becomes a form of algorithmic sabotage. The sheer volume of automated traffic forces pornographic content to dominate search results and trending topics, disrupting the discovery mechanisms used by journalists, researchers, and observers to track unfolding events and effectively blinding external audiences to real-time developments.

Some analysts believe this porn-spam strategy signals a deeper crisis within the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing does not want the public to see.

They argue that the resort to such crude and low-brow tactics, which technically violate China’s own strict domestic anti-pornography laws, suggests a high level of urgency. It implies that the traditional tools of the Great Firewall and state propaganda are no longer sufficient to contain information during specific flashpoints, forcing the regime to use every available method, no matter how unsavory.

The scale of the operation is also seen as revealing. Bier’s reference to 5 to 10 million dormant accounts being activated suggests a long-term investment in what some analysts describe as digital sleeper cells.

The willingness to burn these assets now indicates that Beijing views the current unrest or specific information leaks as a serious threat to political stability.

The tactic also highlights a control vacuum. While the Chinese government maintains tight control over domestic platforms, it struggles to manage narratives once they reach the international information space.

Analysts often interpret the crudeness of the approach as evidence of clumsiness when state actors operate in environments they do not fully own or understand, exposing the limits of Beijing’s ability to shape discourse beyond its borders.

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