On Aug. 28, the safety team at X announced it had uncovered a bot network based in China. The team removed 200,000 connected accounts, 200 of which had been posting about data centers in America. However, the accounts were already highlighted by OpenAI in June, and appear to have been generated last year – so it’s not clear why X is reporting them now.
Coverage of and reactions to the announcement have been mixed. Axios covered the announcement with the headline, “China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage,” while a researcher told Business Insider that the posts were a “non story.”
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So what’s the truth?
The average person, reading both headlines, might be confused. But these events provide a case study in how the same information can be re-used in different arguments, interpreted differently, distorted or taken out of context.
What actually happened?
The 200 accounts removed were “posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy”, X announced.
But it is strange timing for X to share these images now, said Darren Linvill, a professor of media forensics at Clemson University in South Carolina. That, he told Straight Arrow, is because OpenAI already published a blog highlighting the exact same posts in June, and the posts themselves are actually from December 2025 and January 2026.
The dates of the posts are not visible in the X safety announcement.
X didn’t acknowledge that each of these 200 accounts “only posted a couple of times,” said Linvill. “So they’re only responsible for a few hundred posts.”
Social media platforms remove billions of fake accounts every year — including an estimated 671 million on X.
“The fact that they’ve taken down these 200,000 accounts is not new, or unique, or interesting,” Linvill explained. “This is something they are always doing.”
But the announcement didn’t point that out.
“This is the first public acknowledgement of a foreign influence operation takedown that they’ve made in years now,” he told Straight Arrow. “But then they make it sound very unique when in fact, they’re constantly taking down Chinese accounts.”
In its June report, OpenAI described the impact and threat level of the posts as low, because they did not have a wide reach and had been deleted very quickly at the time.
This was “activity spanning one platform, with no evidence of breakout,” OpenAI wrote. “Most of the social media posts we identified generated little or no observable engagement.”
It also appears that X took the posts down well before June, according to OpenAI.
“All these accounts had been created in late 2025, had few or no followers, had only a few posts at the time,” OpenAI reported, “and appear to have all been suspended by X independently of our assessment.”
READ MORE: How data centers became America’s favorite new villain — online and IRL
What happened after X posted about these accounts?
Several politicians repeated the information from X’s announcement.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, described the bot farm as “a massive story” about accounts “pushing propaganda online” on his YouTube channel.
“The Chinese Communist government wants you to believe data centers are terrible,” he said. “They want you to hate data centers, they want you to shut down data centers.”
U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., re-shared the content from X, commenting that “The Chinese Communist Party knows that whoever dominates AI will shape the future.”
President Donald Trump followed this with a post on Truth Social.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” he posted. “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
‘No evidence’
So, is this true? Are there Chinese bots posting on US social media? Yes — but it doesn’t look how you’d think.
“China runs robust influence operations,” Linvill told Straight Arrow. The country generates a lot of bots “and don’t try very hard to hide,” he said.
“They create bots at very high volume,” and tend to be deleted by safety teams very quickly, he said.
Chinese bot operations “have an active interest in influencing our perceptions of many things, especially what we think about China,” he said. But, he added, he had “seen no evidence since January they are interested in undermining the construction of AI data centers in the United States. And even in January, it was scant at best.”
He thinks the fake posts could just be repeating what Americans are talking about online — which is, sometimes, a growing dislike of data centers.
Foreign bots tend to choose a topic because “they need to be a part of the conversation. And they’re using AI to be a part of the conversation,” Linvill told Straight Arrow.
If “they’re talking about AI, it’s because real Americans are talking about AI,” he said.
“These 200 accounts prove that someone working for the Chinese government in January made a few posts that were about AI,” Linvill said. “But we don’t know why they did it.”
The accounts could be testing what works. Online “slop” creators create a lot of content — and they make more based on what people engage with and want to see. It is profitable to make videos about viral topics, to the point that real-life events are now almost expected to be followed by fake videos.
Last summer, 404 Media reported on an account run by someone in Russia, who was using OpenAI’s video generator to make fake videos about fires in Los Angeles. The National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C. was followed by a wave of clips, while fake footage of last month’s flash flooding in Nepal has also been recreated and amplified by bot accounts.
READ MORE: Who’s cashing in on fake Nepal flood videos — and why they’re so popular
Participating in trending topics also allows bot accounts to blend in or seem more real. Rather than trying to shift people’s perspectives on data centers in any direction, Linvill said, foreign state media is more likely trying to create content that will spur engagement.
An account or post coming from China does not necessarily mean it is part of an active disinformation campaign on that topic. The digital-reporting outlet Indicator recently found 152 accounts recreating videos and stealing scripts from cancer patient Sydney Towle, a 23-year-old American content creator who died on Aug. 5.
“At least some of the accounts were created or maintained by a person or people who speak Chinese and/or are based in China,” the publication reported.
Linvill doesn’t agree that the 200 accounts demonstrate a particular campaign against American data centers. Chinese bots “try to suppress narratives, not promote them,” he said. “They’re not very good at promoting narratives.”
Linvill said the main takeaway from the incident should be that “there are a lot of bots online.” But those bots are “not evenly distributed. Most accounts that people are going to engage with and are going to see are real.”
To stay safe, sane and informed, he said, it’s important to treat the digital world like the real world: Be aware, and think critically.
Round out your reading
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