China Communist Party Used Porn Spam to Suppress Criticism on X

People’s Liberation Army soldiers browse the internet at a garrison. Photo courtesy of the People’s Liberation Army.

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...