We heard you like headlines
In which a flock of dormant X accounts wakes up and starts spamming old headlines
If you’re tired of current events, and just want to read the same news from years past over and over, social media spammers have got you covered. For the last several months, a network of X accounts has been flooding the platform with repeated headlines from yesteryear, sometimes accompanied by unrelated images. The headlines posted by these accounts are frequently many years out of date, and none of the posts include links to the articles that the headlines originally adorned. Many of the accounts posting the headlines appear to be hijacked.
The accounts posting the outdated headlines are part of a spam network consisting of at least 1034 X accounts; this total is likely not comprehensive, and there are signs that some accounts in the network were suspended prior to this analysis. The spam accounts are a mix of very new accounts, created in May 2025, and very old accounts, mostly created prior to 2016. The newer accounts have few or no followers, while the older accounts generally have between a few dozen and a few hundred. Each account has posted dozens or hundreds of news headlines over the last few months.
The older accounts in the spam network appear to be hijacked. Almost all of the spam accounts created prior to 2025 have a multi-year gap in their activity between their initial posts and their recent spam posts. In most cases, the early content looks organic, indicating that the accounts were likely created for personal or business purposes, and later hacked or otherwise appropriated from their original owners.
The accounts in this spam network posted a combined 193714 posts in the period from April 1st to May 23rd, 2025. The network’s activity is erratic and spiky, with brief bursts of high volume posting alternating with periods of relative silence. At its most active points, the network posted hundreds of times an hour, a mix of top-level posts (mostly outdated headlines) and replies.
This spam network has posted over 18 thousand distinct headlines, with most of them posted repeatedly over the course of the last couple months. The three most frequently posted headlines are from 2022, 2020, and 2020 respectively, and the majority of the others are similarly outdated. Many but not all of the headlines posted by the network appear to have been ripped from Associated Press articles, and some have random text such as “431 inada 683” appended to the end of the original headline.
The accounts in the spam network sometimes reply to one another’s outdated headline posts with… additional outdated headlines. The replies are usually posted a few hours after the original post, and the reply headline generally has no relation to the headline being replied to.
In addition to the scraped headlines, the accounts in the spam network also periodically post apparent nonsense, such as “chudai meme armnod 627 niwniw 598” or “loiana kkandf oiiand 7346”. As with the headline posts, the nonsense posts are sometimes accompanied by random images.
Data for this analysis was gathered via a combination of Wayback Machine archives and Nitter.