X said Chinese bots fuelled the data centre backlash. A researcher checked

X said it had found a Chinese bot farm pushing Americans to turn against AI data centres. A researcher who went looking for those accounts found that almost nobody had seen them.

Darren Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University, identified at least 59 of those accounts with zero engagement. X probably suspended them before they could gather any following, he told Business Insider, which reported the finding on Friday. He called the episode a “non-story”.

“No real humans saw these posts about data centers,” Linvill said.

Ninety posts, all from January

Linvill co-directs Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, which studies online disinformation. He used a Clemson platform that keeps data from suspended X accounts. Then he searched for an obscure hashtag visible in the screenshots X had published.

That hashtag, capacityauction, returned 90 posts. All of them date from January. Each account posted two or three times before X suspended it, according to a spreadsheet Linvill shared with Business Insider. TNW has not reviewed that spreadsheet.

The posts themselves were mostly links. Several pointed at local coverage of PJM’s 2027/2028 capacity auction. That auction cleared at the $333.44 per MW-day cap and fell short of the grid operator’s reliability target. Others carried AI-generated cartoons showing data centre operators getting rich while families opened their electricity bills.

What X said, and what it left out

X’s Global Government Affairs account posted the disclosure on Thursday. Its safety team had identified a bot farm of roughly 200,000 accounts, it said. Within that farm sat 200 accounts posting “in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy”.

The post has 3.2 million views. It names no accounts and no operators.

Craig Hale noted in TechRadar what the disclosure leaves out. There is no detail on the ties to China, no engagement or reach figures, and no account of what the other 199,800 accounts were doing.

X did not call any of the claims false. It described the debate as legitimate and said the accounts breached its authenticity policy. It has not said since how far the 200 accounts travelled, or what the other 199,800 were posting.

OpenAI reported the same campaign in June

Some of the posts X showed on Thursday had already appeared in an OpenAI threat report from June, Linvill said. TNW covered that report when OpenAI said China-linked accounts had used ChatGPT to generate opposition to US data centres.

“They’re very, very clearly connected,” Linvill said. “OpenAI identified it back in June.”

OpenAI called that operation Data Center Bandwagon. The accounts behind it prompted in Simplified Chinese and usually asked for English output. They used VPNs to get around the restrictions on mainland China. OpenAI also recorded them posting genuine news stories about capacity auctions and data centre power demand.

The governor says China is not why he moved

Greg Abbott spent this month freezing data centre construction in Texas. Asked on Fox News on Friday whether real concerns about data centres were being driven by China, the governor said they were not.

“I haven’t done it because of anything said by China, I’ve done it by listening to and working with constituents,” Abbott said. “None of that has anything to do with China.”

China is trying to influence the debate, he said. His own reversal came from Texans in the communities where the sites are going up. The power demand he was looking at ran to five times the state’s current ability to supply it.

Abbott has told the state utility commission and grid operator to shield residents from the infrastructure costs. He has floated a ban on rural projects and said developments must be audited first. He says the rules have stopped about 1,800 of them. TNW reported his shift earlier this month, when he said the industry had dug its own grave.

The opposition is measurable

A University of Pennsylvania survey in early August put opposition to new local data centres at 61%, up 12 points on its own February and March reading. A YouGov survey released last week found 24% of Americans call new data centres good for the country, against 47% who call them bad. Business Insider cited a Gallup poll from May putting local opposition above 70%.

The building has run into it everywhere. TNW reported in July that protests had reached 42 states, and in August that moratoriums had passed 500.

Who is publishing the research

Samuel Woolley, who studies propaganda at the University of Pittsburgh, said the opposition is real and bipartisan. Every report he has seen on Chinese data centre propaganda has come from a Big Tech company with a “vested interest” in the buildout, he said. Elon Musk owns X, and his companies run on data centres.

“We have to take research that’s potentially political with a pinch of salt,” Woolley said.

Jim Prosser, a communications consultant and former head of corporate communications at Twitter, made a similar point to Axios. If Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agree on something, he said, it is probably not a Chinese psyop.

Congress has been pulling the other way. The House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to the FBI and White House advisers in June, asking for a briefing on foreign influence campaigns aimed at US data centres. It cited an estimate that opposition had delayed or blocked about $45.8bn of projects in Virginia alone.

The industry has been making its own case for months, as TNW reported when Big Tech went on a charm offensive to get its data centres built. What X added on Thursday was a number. What it did not add was a reach.