X Says It Suspended More Than 13,000 Accounts Tied to Iran, Russia and China Ahead of Midterms

A week after OpenAI said it shut down two influence operations from Russia and Iran, X announced Wednesday, Oct. 14, that it has suspended more than 13,000 accounts tied to three suspected foreign influence networks. The company says the networks were linked to Iran, Russia and China and aimed at U.S. politics ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

X's Global Government Affairs team said the networks used fake accounts to post and amplify political content targeting candidates and public figures "across the political spectrum." The company said its Safety team found them through "proactive sweeps and investigations" under its rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.

What X has and has not disclosed

The 13,000-plus figure is a combined total across all three networks. X did not say how many accounts belong to Iran, how many to Russia and how many to China.

The company also has not detailed the political messages the accounts pushed. It has not said which candidates were targeted or how the accounts were tied to the three governments. Nothing in the announcement shows the accounts changed any voter's behavior.

Those gaps matter because the attribution rests on X's own say-so. Outside researchers have no published dataset to check, and the company has not released one.

The scale

Thirteen thousand accounts is a large number. In 2021, Twitter, as X was then known, announced it had suspended 238 accounts purportedly operating from Iran. The two announcements are years apart and X has not said how its detection methods compare, but the gap in the raw figures is wide.

X has not said how many of the 13,000 accounts had real reach. Accounts that post into the void are a different problem from accounts that drive a trending topic.

Election rules X says it will enforce

Alongside the suspensions, X restated its election policies. They bar misleading information about how, when or where to vote, attempts to suppress turnout, and voter intimidation, including calls for violence near polling places.

Users can flag election-related posts through a "civic integrity" reporting option to request a Community Note that adds context. In urgent cases, X said it may apply labels to posts that break its election rules. The company said the effort will continue through Election Day and beyond.

In the announcement, X Global Government Affairs framed the work in free speech terms: "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and we are proud that X is the global town square where these debates happen. Our job is to keep that conversation authentic, open, and safe."

A pattern across platforms

OpenAI said last week that it disrupted two alleged operations from Russia and Iran that used ChatGPT to create fake journalist personas and to run a "think-tank" that covertly spread anti-Ukraine propaganda. That case involved AI-generated content. X has not said whether its three networks used generative AI.

Foreign governments running fake American voices to push political content is a straightforward problem. It is different from Americans arguing with each other, however loudly, and drawing that line is the hard part. The line gets harder to see when the platform doing the sorting is also the one grading its own work. X says the targets spanned the political spectrum. It has named no candidate on either side.

Supporters of the platform have praised the move on X itself. Conservative commentator Eric Daugherty called it official and thanked the company in a post that drew more than 158,000 views by Wednesday night. Reaction in that thread was largely approving.

What comes next

The open question is whether X will publish anything that lets outsiders test its claims. A per-country breakdown, sample posts or account-creation data would show whether the networks were what the company says they are, and how far their content traveled. X has not said whether it plans to release any of that before Nov. 3.

The midterms will decide control of Congress. Any further takedowns before then would come from the same self-reported process.