X platform imposes large-scale bans on encrypted accounts, many Chinese-speaking influencers affected

Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On June 12, X (formerly Twitter) experienced a large-scale account suspension event, affecting many KOLs and official accounts in the crypto space. This action has drawn widespread attention from the community, with numerous active accounts in both the Chinese and English circles being impacted, including the GMGN official account and its founder, Shapolang, Wang Xiaoer, Wizard, ElizaOS team, and others.

Many users initially believed the incident was only targeting GMGN. Currently, suspended accounts are gradually filing appeals, but the platform has yet to provide a clear explanation, and community discussions are still brewing.

Concentrated Account Suspensions, Not Just GMGN System

GMGN co-founder Haze responded today via Telegram, stating that they have not yet received an official explanation for the account suspensions. The team is in communication with the X platform to appeal and strive for a quick account recovery. This incident is not the first occurrence of platform cleanup actions, but its suddenness and lack of clear reasons have raised doubts among many KOLs regarding the platform's content regulation mechanisms.

Among the suspended accounts, there are several well-known names in the Chinese community, including:

• GMGN official account @gmgnai and founder Jige @haze0x
• Shapolang @Wolfy_XBT
• Wang Xiaoer @brc20niubi
• Wizard @0xCryptoWizard
• gake @Ga__ke

Meanwhile, similar situations have emerged in the English community. The official account of the meme project ElizaOS @elizaOS and its founder @shawmakesmagic were frozen yesterday, and some accounts associated with the TRUMP wallet were also temporarily suspended before being restored.

Although GMGN was the first to be noticed, the affected accounts are not limited to a single project system. KOL Kuai Dong (@_FORAB) noted that, based on account behavior, these KOLs generally share several common characteristics:

• Most have recently been active in AI Agent and meme-related topics
• Frequently mentioned or interacted with keywords like ai16z, ElizaOS, etc.
• Have interaction records with GMGN team members or topics
• Some accounts have recently seen a surge in followers, with high content publishing frequency, suspected to be identified by the system as manipulative dissemination

This indicates that the platform's account suspension actions are more likely based on behavioral pattern recognition in bulk, rather than targeting specific teams or users in a particular language area.

Speculations and Misunderstandings in the Brewing Public Opinion: Panic, Business Warfare, and Even "Being Taken Down"

This incident quickly triggered panic in the Chinese community. Some even claimed in Telegram and WeChat groups that "the project team was taken down in Shenzhen" and attributed the event to some form of offline law enforcement action.

However, logically, such statements are fundamentally unfounded. As a U.S. company, X platform's risk control mechanisms rely on its own content algorithms and signal models, with no direct information channels to local law enforcement agencies in China. Account suspensions are essentially actions taken by the platform itself, rather than due to external interference. Some speculate that this is a business warfare initiated by competitors, triggering the X platform's risk control mechanisms through concentrated reporting to achieve competitive goals. This claim remains unverified. There is even a belief that this incident is related to a political meme hinting at "Trump and Musk's words," as some suspended accounts had posted or shared this image.

This claim sounds somewhat logical, but upon closer observation, it becomes evident that a significant portion of the suspended accounts did not post that meme, and smaller accounts that had posted similar content but were less active were mostly unaffected, while many accounts that shared political memes were not impacted. Therefore, attributing the account suspensions to a single image or specific content clearly lacks explanatory power. The more likely scenario is that the meme coincidentally appeared among a batch of accounts that the system was monitoring, but it was not the primary cause.

In fact, similar situations occurred during the previous NFT boom. In 2021, many well-known cryptocurrency analysts, traders, and KOLs with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers had their accounts suddenly suspended without any prior warning, including PlanB (@100trillionUSD), Willy Woo (@woonomic), @TheCryptoDog, @woj.eth, and others. Some of these accounts were permanently banned, but many were restored after generating significant community reactions.

What to Do If Your Account Is Suspended?

Based on Kuai Dong's experience, there have been similar situations in the past where many institutional and media accounts were suspended simultaneously but were subsequently restored, so here are some experiences from that time.

Path One: Appeal. Directly initiate an appeal, informing them that due to being in mainland China, accessing Twitter often requires a VPN, and with multiple colleagues operating accounts, the IP changes frequently. Make multiple appeals to clarify the situation.

Path Two: Contact a regional manager. In some countries and regions, such as the United States and Japan, where Twitter has a high market share, there are usually dedicated business and advertising managers. According to friends who have gone through this channel, they can help identify the reasons and expedite the approval process for appeals, but this channel is only applicable to corporate accounts, not personal ones. In regions without dedicated personnel, there are usually local 4A advertising agencies that act as agents for Twitter, and they can also help clients make contact.

Path Three: Wait for natural recovery. Some accounts, like the previous media PANews, went through the above paths multiple times without success, and then miraculously got unbanned a year later.

There are countless such examples, usually taking between 3 months to 1 year, but during this period, creating new accounts may also lead to further suspensions.

How Content Creators Can Protect Themselves

In the absence of official explanations, how can creators and project teams protect themselves? Currently, some practical avoidance suggestions are circulating within the industry:

• Avoid repeatedly posting contract addresses or trading links in a short period

Especially for newly launched projects, unaudited contracts, and highly speculative meme assets, which are prone to triggering risk control systems.

• Do not flood the platform with content that closely overlaps with trending tags

For example, continuously posting about "AI Agent," "CA," "airdrop," "meme season," etc., may be identified as manipulative behavior.

• Reduce concentrated interactions with a single account or project

This includes concentrated retweets, comments, and likes on a particular KOL's tweets; such "group interactions" are considered high-risk behavior under X's new algorithms.

For most content creators, the X platform remains one of the most important traffic arenas. However, under the AI-driven content review mechanism, some previously viable "high-frequency posting" strategies have now become high-risk behaviors.