X Quietly Suspends 700+ X Accounts Sending Anti-Qatar Propaganda

The network, operational since around March 2025, had successfully gamed local trends

Back in June I posted a fairly detailed investigation of a botnet on X spreading anti-Qatar hashtags. You can read it here. There are/were over 700 accounts in the network, and they have successfully managed to get hashtags trending most days since March 2025. Unusually, they appear in the trending section and when you click the ‘Top’ tab on X, but often don’t appear when you click ‘latest’. Nonetheless, they successfully gamed trends.

Anyway, yesterday X seems to have suspended most of them. I downloaded a random sample of around 100, with only five remaining, suggesting X suspended around 95%. As is typical with X, they have not announced this, nor indicated if it was a state-backed influence operation. But thought I’d update you all.