On April 26th, Nikita Bier, the product leader of platform X, characterized the rampant Chinese pornographic bots and spam on the platform as "national-level bot army attacks from China," which triggered extreme dissatisfaction among many users in the Chinese-speaking community. Many accused him of racism, arrogance, and shifting blame, claiming he couldn't even distinguish basic facts.

Of course, I think we shouldn’t rush to moral judgments; let’s return to rationality first. If we break this matter down into several interest chains, you’ll actually find that Nikita's attitude towards this fact isn’t thoughtless or just a spur-of-the-moment comment.

It’s more about his position, the resources he holds, and the understanding he has that together determine the result. Therefore, rather than blaming him for personal moral issues, it’s more accurate to say it’s a natural extension of the interest chain.

Who is Nikita Bier? A "political economist" raised by American growth logic

If we want to understand why he said this, we need to first understand who he is.

In fact, Nikita is a typical Silicon Valley elite.

I think he has three labels:

Political correctness, viral growth, and rapid monetization.

The so-called political correctness is due to Nikita being a high-achieving student at UC Berkeley, with dual degrees in political economy and business. These two fields essentially teach you to view the world through the lens of national interests and power struggles, so from the day he started studying, the thoughts instilled in him were about considering everything from a political perspective. This really lays the foundation for how he establishes viewpoints on many issues, or, in other words, his values and worldview.

As for viral growth and rapid monetization, these two labels represent how he played "American growth hacking" to the fullest during his entrepreneurial journey.

• In 2012, he created Politify, a policy simulation tool that gained traction through viral marketing, honing his skill in "low-cost user acquisition."
• In 2017, he launched tbh, an anonymous compliment app targeting high school students with positive energy, which he sold to Facebook/Meta a few years later for about $30 million, achieving his first financial success.
• In 2022, he released Gas, an upgraded version of tbh, adding paid revelations and gamification, which he sold to Discord, earning another profit, and became a somewhat well-known "serial entrepreneur" in Silicon Valley.
• In July 2025, he became the product head of X by "posting to ascend," while also serving as a partner at Lightspeed Venture Capital and an advisor to Solana.

Therefore, I believe all of Nikita's successes are built within the closed loop of Western youth markets, psychological drives, viral growth, and rapid monetization. This implies that he has not deeply engaged with the Chinese market, nor has he had any positive interactions with China’s gray and black industries.

So in his view, user behavior that is scalable and unusual doesn't represent commercial profit-seeking, but is seen as organized behavior from external forces. This has been the cognitive template shaped over a decade from his time in school to his startup experiences. It’s ingrained. So you see, why when it comes to the Chinese promotion sector, many people who interact frequently and exhibit some oddities get flagged, and sometimes large-scale account bans happen.

The three interest chains as I see them

To understand issues, one must see the essence; thus, when we break it down, we can analyze Nikita's remarks into three interest chains.

The first interest chain is the KPI survival chain of platform X; it's his livelihood, and shifting blame is an easier way to preserve it

Currently, platform X's core revenue comes from three types: advertising (which constitutes the majority) + Premium subscriptions (which presumably pays the salaries of blue verified users) + Grok AI monetization.

Therefore, as the product head, Nikita essentially needs to drive platform growth, user growth, and revenue growth. I believe the KPI is straightforward: to ensure all three sources of income grow, and to grow them nicely.

However, the Chinese spam bots are precisely X's "tumor," characterized by:

• Large scale: Nikita himself stated there are 5-10 million accounts, which are sending spam messages in bulk every minute.
• Low cost: The Chinese black market uses cheap servers + phone number cards + VPNs, costing only a few dollars to infinitely register accounts.
• High harm: These bots do not attack X but rather harvest traffic, directing users to Telegram groups, scam operations, and porn live streams, directly polluting timelines, search results, and recommendation algorithms, leading to the loss of many real users and causing advertisers to hesitate investing money.

So at this point, if Nikita admits that this is a failure of our risk control model, that the algorithm is insensitive to non-English traffic, and that there is a buildup of technical debt, he would undoubtedly take the blame, have to spend real money to改 the system, and potentially affect growth targets; a large ship is difficult to turn, and pulling one will move the other's whole chain.

Just think about it, a person like Musk, do you think he could tolerate a product head saying "our technology is lacking"?

So there is only one optimal solution: shift the blame to the "national-level water army in China," which has several advantages:

Exemption: It's not that our technology is weak, but that the opponent is too strong, it's a state action.

Character building: X is defending global free speech, in line with Musk's narrative, and can also gain some goodwill.

Appeasement: Showing loyalty to the American regulatory authorities/Congress, saying, look, we are combating foreign interference, and perhaps in the future, we can encounter less trouble in policies.

In such a deal, don’t you think it’s a win-win situation?

The second chain, I think, involves the interest chain of Silicon Valley venture capital and geopolitical interests, as he actually needs to reinforce his own support system

Nikita is actually not just a product lead at X; as mentioned earlier, he is also a partner at Lightspeed Venture Capital. Lightspeed is a typical Silicon Valley VC that has invested in American consumer internet products like BeReal and Flo Health, with virtually no interactions with Chinese tech companies.

What’s the mainstream narrative in Silicon Valley now?

China is a systemic rival. TikTok bans, data security reviews, and supply chain decoupling all push China toward the position of "enemy." In this atmosphere, any "scaled abnormal behavior" coming from China is assumed to be "national behavior." Therefore, this is not really a matter of prejudice but a matter of survival laws.

In fact, platform X also exists in the crevice of Sino-American competition, wanting to be the "global digital square," to earn global traffic money, while also wanting to avoid being condemned by the US Congress for "tolerating Chinese influence."

Thus, I believe Nikita’s blame-shifting perfectly suits the political correctness position: helping Musk solidify his position while also not affecting X's exposure to gray market traffic from China (after all, gray market users won’t subscribe to Premium, thus not making any money).

Of course, I think there’s also an invisible benefit for him personally: in the Silicon Valley VC circle, "standing up to China" is a plus, as it can enhance one’s personal reputation, making it easier to find projects and raise funds later on.

The third chain is the traffic harvesting chain of China's gray and black industries, which is the real world he cannot comprehend

In fact, China’s internet gray market has long surpassed minor skirmishes.

I found data from last year, indicating that by the first quarter of 2025, the domestic black and gray market's scale had exceeded 280 billion yuan, with over 8 million employees, forming a complete interest chain of mediation, technical support, legal disguise, and financial distribution. These people are actually unrelated to national behavior; they

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