Nikita Bier accuses China of flooding Elon Musk's X with porn during civil unrest: 'Been a difficult problem to solve’

X’s product head Nikita Bier claims China floods the platform with porn spam during unrest to hide real-time news.

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, in a tweet, accused the Chinese government of flooding the social media platform with pornographic spam during political unrest. He shared the post in response to complaints from users saying “Chinese search on X is broken”.

Nikita Bier (R) serves as the Head of Product at Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter). (Screengrab (X))

“The Chinese government floods X search results with porn whenever there is political unrest—to prevent their citizens from finding out real-time information. This has been a difficult problem to solve but we are aware & working on it,” wrote Nikita Bier.

He shared the post in response to an X user asking, “Chinese search on X is broken. It’s filled with spam and illicit ads, making it impossible to find useful info. Also, when using the 'from:' filter to search my own posts, many from the last 48 hours are missing from the results. Given the surge in Chinese-speaking users, fixing the search infrastructure is becoming an urgent matter. The current state of spam-filled results and poor indexing of recent tweets is detrimental to user retention. I hope to see an update on this soon. Thank you.” The X user had also tagged Elon Musk and Nikita Bier on the post.

How did social media react?

While some backed Bier, others demanded proof behind his remark. An individual wrote, “I demand to see the proof! For research purposes.” Another added, “Mobilising tens of millions of accounts to pollute search results is not governance; it is book burning and burying scholars in the digital age.”

Slamming Bier, a Chinese journalist lashed out at Bier and commented, “What is this B* about? What is true is that Chinese accounts like mine are shadowbanned on X.”