X said Chinese bots fuelled the data centre backlash. A researcher checked
X said it had found a Chinese bot farm pushing Americans to turn against AI data centres. A researcher who went looking for those accounts found that almost nobody had seen them.
Darren Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University, identified at least 59 of those accounts with zero engagement. X probably suspended them before they could gather any following, he told Business Insider, which reported the finding on Friday. He called the episode a “non-story”.
“No real humans saw these posts about data centers,” Linvill said.
Ninety posts, all from January
Linvill co-directs Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, which studies online disinformation. He used a Clemson platform that keeps data from suspended X accounts. Then he searched for an obscure hashtag visible in the screenshots X had published.
That hashtag, capacityauction, returned 90 posts. All of them date from January. Each account posted two or three times before X suspended...
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