X purges 13,000 accounts linked to suspected meddling ahead of US midterms | Hacker News Reader

X purges 13,000 accounts linked to suspected meddling ahead of US midterms

theregister.com

67 pointsilreb106 comments

I'm sure this was done in a perfectly fair and balanced manner and not in a way that is at all aligned to the CEO's publicly stated politics.

What a blow to Elon to lose his account in his own platform

Meanwhile: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-midterms-republicans-do...

Manipulation of elections is OK as long as you do it with money.

Also this shit: https://www.primetimer.com/news/ex-journalist-accuses-elon-m...

I am fine with content policeing actions from being legal but I think we content enforcement of this nature on platforms that live on freedom of press and speech should be forced to publicize when that take action against accounts. Publicize the lists for bans, and reason for it. Here the reason is given but its not account linked so its hard to say if the reason is justifed with the accounts histories.

Maybe the government needs a meta organization that upholds freedom of speech enforcement from platforms and companies that get broad Section 230 protections. I.e Facebook, X, Twitch, Youtube, etc. If a company can just purge you soruce of speech entirely the country protections seem lacking for the public welfare. Curious what other people think. I know an agency like this is rife to partisan infiltration but if its roll is to for unbanning rather than banning I think the scope of its potential abuse would be extremely narrow.

Probably 13,000 accounts that suddenly went dark after Ukraine took out some datacenter in Russia recently.

Doubtful... It looks like Starlink showed it's colors to Ukraine and it's admiration for the Russian state what was it within 24hrs of that operation? Yikes.

That's not an accurate characterization of what happened, and I think you know that.

I don't think anyone knows that, given it's news from the past couple days.

Do you have updated information about this? I've been following this pretty closely and that's more or less what I've read and seen discussed.

Your perspective is beyond unfathomable.

Early in the war, did Starlink rapidly supply free terminals to Ukraine, or to Russia?

Is Starlink continuing to providing civilian and defensive services to Ukraine, or to Russia?

Has Starshield historically provided offensive communications services to Ukraine, or to Russia?

Did Ukraine or Russia received tens of thousands of Starlink terminals from allied governments, with ongoing subscription costs funded by those allies?

When Starlink discovered that Russians were using smuggled Starlink terminals, did they work with the Ukrainian government to carefully whitelist all terminals operated by Ukrainians, disabling the ones operated by Russia? Or was it the other way around?

Which country's defence minister publicly thanked SpaceX for their rapid cooperation in countering their opponent's military use of Starlink?

Can you identify a single documented instance of SpaceX knowingly supplying equipment or communications services to the Russian military?

A SINGLE INSTANCE??

I think the only think you've been "following pretty closely" are anti-Musk propaganda spreaders. I'm personally very disappointed in Musk's rhetoric, but in terms of military matters his opinions are irrelevant, equivalent to any drunk idiot spouting opinions between beers. But it's pretty clear to me that without Starlink, Ukraine could have lost the whole war within months.

It's fun to see that one person decided to downvote me instead of replying with what should be the absolute easiest of challenges. I'll take that downvote as an explicit capitulation.

Remember, Musk would have been entirely within his right to explicitly refuse all military use of consumer Starlink. He didn't. No matter how much of a dick he is with his words, no matter how brain broken Twitter has made him, he cannot take away what he has done for Ukraine. By choosing to answer their call for help, he did more to save Ukraine than could ever be expected of any one person.

> Remember, Musk would have been entirely within his right to explicitly refuse all military use of consumer Starlink.

Sure, he could have - and then Biden would have invoked the DPA and forced him to do so anyways, removing him from SpaceX if required. Private individuals cannot meddle in US foreign policy and we have laws to prevent it.

> He didn't. No matter how much of a dick he is with his words, no matter how brain broken Twitter has made him, he cannot take away what he has done for Ukraine.

I won't deny that Starlink is vital for Ukraine, but Musk is on the record calling for Ukrainians to capitulate. He's been very consistent about that.

The fact that he provided Starlink terminals under duress does not make him a saint.

I didn't downvote you, but you are strawmanning with your question. Elon doesn't have to give Russians access to Starlink to tip the war one way or another or support his politics

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/blinken-refuses-criticize-m...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ukraine-loses-starlink-...

https://observer.com/2026/09/why-elon-musk-is-giving-zelensk...

The guy is in such close contact with Putin it made the news many times. To the point where he defended claims of being a Russian asset by saying they couldn't pay him enough. As if they had negotiated it lol. He's a slimy guy who cozies up to dictators and fascists.

Cutting U SAID was a big win for Russia and it was one of his most cherished political contributions so far via doge. Celebrating it with a chainsaw...

https://www.dw.com/en/us-court-allows-musks-doge-to-make-fur...

I could keep going but I know your type. It's pointless.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/yandex-outage/

Posts on "For you" are mostly pro right/republican/Trump these days, even if you block such accounts frequently.

X is a deeply partisan website. It actively censors leftist viewpoints. So it's not surprising it would skew rightward.

This effect is self reinforcing, if you are leftish, and you are in a tightening space, why would you stay?

Why are you still using Twitter? It has been years since the purchase, you've had plenty of time to switch.

People are just shrugging and going back to it.[1]

It's really disheartening.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_once_again_marks_the_sp...

Some people, not others: https://lexontech.org/x-is-bad-though

(I wouldn't want to be in a community with the people who went back to the Nazi bar anyway, so it works out for me. Can barely catch up with my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds as-is.)

Spent couple minutes scrolling my For you page and the only one political post was celebrating the Ukrainian strike on the 6 su-34 planes

I stopped using Twitter after they made it so the only way to avoid all of that was to individually block every single account. I spent a couple weeks clicking that I wasn't interested before it was obvious that you'd see Musk's rantings until you blocked him.

>X purges 13,000 accounts

Yeah, Im sure its all “After careful review,”

In other news I just read today how Gough Luis account got banned for posting organic content and linking to his own blog. https://goughlui.com/2026/10/15/opinion-death-of-the-old-int...

Sad but accurate summary about current state of internet is “There is no incentive to be honest, aside from having a conscience.”

meanwhile Musk spending $250M+ on Republican campaigns. but sure, ban a few Twitter accounts

Knowing Musk, they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone.

true, luckily they're mostly offline since yandex gone boom

There's no evidence of that happening. In fact there's counter-evidence:

https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3m...

People keep saying this with 0 proof other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard

> other than the INDEXING "bot" trafick being down on cloudflare dashboard

So they do have some proof?

OP: >they probably purged pro Democrats while leaving Russian bots alone

In that context it's pretty obvious "bots" are referring to disinformation or "troll" bots, not bots doing indexing/scraping.

> Mr. Franklin claims he went to the moon first, with no proof except a soggy box of matches with the words "moon pie" scribbled on it.

So he has some proof? So the jury is still out, so this is controversial, right?

I don't follow. Could you clarify whether you're asserting Cloudflare's data is worthless, or just that you believe your weird anecdote dismisses it?

Not GP, but please take a look at CloudFlare's data. As far as I understand, it was only measuring indexing bots, without attempting to look for anything political or shady.

Yes, Cloudflare's data about A is worthless as proof for B. Cloudflare never made the claims that were based on those graphs. It just shows that traffic out of datacenters stops when those get hit, to the surprise of nobody, proving nothing.

It's not a proof of anything. If I build a dam to block your local river and you stop getting water, is it a proof there were fish in the river?

People who measure traffic to sites supposedly plagued by russian bots (the ones we care about here: trolls, disinformation, etc.) saw absolutely no dip in traffic

> It's not a proof of anything. If I build a dam to block your local river and you stop getting water, is it a proof there were fish in the river?

I mean, we can use a little common sense and assume that there were fish in the river, right? We'd be foolish not to.

Is it common sense though?

Do you think that if tomorrow a Google data center goes down the NSA spyware, botnets and other online campaigns go down? I very much doubt it

Is it common sense that a river has fish? Yes. Is it common sense that Yandex has russian bots? Yes.

I don't think any of this is controversial. Bloviate all you want about Google and rivers or whatever the fuck, I think we're getting into the weeds and really losing the plot here.

Show the proofs then? Which platform infected by russian bots saw a traffic dip when 3 yandex data centers went down? It should be very easy to prove

That's not how proof works.

What I said:

> We can use a little common sense

What you read:

> This assumption is irrefutable proof!

Thanks bud.

Reminder that Twitter (X) has done similar things (shadow-banning) before.

HN does too. It's a standard moderation practice.

I've been a moderator (on smaller platforms). Can confirm that it's standard.

Thank you HN for highlighting new usernames in green

Sounds like they're just getting rid of competition

A fraction of what the UK imprisons for wrong think each year.

Twitter over 300 million daily active users. 13,000 is 0.004% of that.

A standard drop of water is 0.05 ml. A standard household bucket is about 3 gallons. So the proverbial "drop in the bucket" is 0.0004%.

So, for all you naysayers out there saying this is just a drop in the bucket, it's literally x10 that.

Why, if they could get this up to a repeatable process and ban 13,000 accounts per day, that would be 1.5% every year. After a couple of years of work, that might even be perceptible to the average user. Sounds like the problem is well in hand.

Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.

Not sure why number of accounts matter at all, even more if you are depending on internal Twitter investigations to determine that without knowing any of the methodology to detect those, etc.

But sure, you can always defend Twitter if that's the hill you want to die on.

>Without any stats/metrics about engagement of real users with these accounts you have absolute no basis to do any comparison to drops of water.

I think it's fair to assume that if x.com refuses to provide stats that are easily obtainable for them (eg. views or followers), that those stats aren't favorable to them.

This is the most contorted argument I have ever seen. I admire it on some level. Like we could be friends but I wouldn't let you watch my dogs

Sometimes 0.004% matters when the population is not homogenous.

The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth. I would not be surprised if the 0.004% top X users in terms of followers have a majority of followers as well.

So implying that because 0.004% is a small proportion of total users, this user ban is unconsequential seems flawed to me.

> The 0.004% richest Americans hold the majority of US wealth

That is massively false. It’s closer to 5%. Still really bad IMO but 0.004% is a ludicrous thing to claim

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

That's not the rebuttal you think it is.

The top 1% is ~35% or so and this fraction is rising.

Being off by a factor of greater than one thousand is pretty bad.

If you think there is a wealth inequality problem, I would encourage you to call out bad information, because it is the simplest way for opponents to discredit your position.

(Clearly this is what I am doing…)

>The 0.004% richest Amreicans hold the majority of US wealth

Nah, it’s more like the top 5% hold half. The top 0.1% are at ~13%.

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