Your butt determines your head: Why does Nikita have to categorize commercial gray-area activities as "state attacks"?

On April 26, X platform product leader Nikita Bier directly labeled the rampant Chinese porn bots and junk information on the platform as “Chinese state-level bot army attacks,” which sparked widespread extreme dissatisfaction among many users in the Chinese-language community. Many people scolded him for racial discrimination and arrogance, and for shifting the blame—saying he couldn’t even tell basic facts apart.

Of course, I think we shouldn’t rush to moral judgment—we should first return to rationality. If we break this matter down into several interest chains, you’ll actually see that the reason Nikita takes such an attitude toward this fact is not that he lacks reason—more that he blurted out that line on impulse after his brain overheated.

What’s really determining it is, more than anything else, his position, the resources he has in his hands, and the cognition he has loaded into his own head. So rather than pinning this on his personal morality, we can say it’s the natural extension of the interest chain.

Who is Nikita Bier? A “political-economy person” raised on American growth logic

If we want to figure out why he said it, I think we first need to understand who he really is.

In fact, Nikita is himself a typical Silicon Valley elite.

On him, I feel there are three labels:

political correctness, viral growth, and rapid cashing-out.

As for political correctness, it’s because Nikita, as a top student from UC Berkeley, holds dual degrees in political economy and business. These two fields essentially teach you to view the world through frameworks for national interests and power struggles. So from the day he started school, the ideas pumped into his head were, in essence, “think about everything first from a political perspective.” This also laid the underlying logic of how he forms his views on many things—his values and worldview, in other words.

Then there’s viral growth and rapid cashing-out—these two labels are actually what his entrepreneurial path looks like when “American growth hacker” is played to the extreme.

• In 2012, he did Politify, a policy-simulation tool. It became popular thanks to viral spread, and he honed his skills in “low-cost user acquisition.”
• In 2017, he worked on tbh, an anonymous mutual-compliment app targeting high school students with “positive energy.” After a few years, he sold it to Facebook/Meta, earning about $30 million and completing the original accumulation for his first bucket of money.
• In 2022, he launched Gas, an upgraded version of tbh, adding paid “reveal” features and gamified gameplay. He then sold it to Discord, earned another chunk, and became a somewhat well-known “serial successful entrepreneur” in Silicon Valley.
• In July 2025, he used a “posting to rise” method to become X’s product lead, while also serving as a Lightspeed venture capital partner and a Solana advisor.

So for all of Nikita’s success, I think it’s built on a closed loop involving the Western youth market, psychological drivers, viral growth, and rapid monetization. Which also means he hasn’t really done deep work in the Chinese market, nor had any positive interactions with China’s gray-and-black industries.

So in his eyes, as long as user behavior is scaled up and abnormal, it’s not about business profit-seeking, but about external forces organizing behavior. That’s the cognition template he formed over more than ten years from school to entrepreneurship. It’s in the bones. So look—when you bring it into the China push region, many people, after slightly frequent interactions with a bit of abnormality, are made to “verify” it—sometimes even leading to large-scale account bans during certain periods.

The Three Interest Chains I See

Actually, to look at a problem properly, you need to look at the essence. If we tear it apart and examine it in detail, we can break Nikita’s remarks into three interest chains, to analyze his choices.

First interest chain: I think it’s X platform’s KPI life-or-death chain—his livelihood. Shifting blame is the easiest way to protect himself

In fact, X’s core revenue now has three categories: advertising (the largest share) + Premium subscriptions (this should have already gone to pay salaries for Blue v) + Grok AI monetization.

So as product leader, Nikita fundamentally needs to drive growth on the platform—user growth and revenue growth. And I think the KPI is basically just one thing: make all three of these revenues go up, and make the increase look good.

But Chinese junk bots are, quite frankly, X’s “tumor.” Their typical characteristics include:

• Large scale: Nikita himself said there’s a pool of 5–10 million accounts, and they batch-post junk information every minute.
• Low cost: China’s gray-market industry uses cheap servers + phone number SIM cards + VPNs; once you put it together, the cost is less than a few dollars, so you can register accounts endlessly.
• Great harm: these bots don’t attack X directly. Instead, they lie on the platform and harvest traffic, sending users to Telegram groups, scam rings, and porn live streams—directly contaminating timelines, search results, and recommendation algorithms. This causes many real users to leave, and advertisers may also hesitate to invest money.

So you see, if Nikita admits, “this is because our risk-control model failed; our algorithms aren’t sensitive to non-English traffic; and we accumulated technical debt,” then he would definitely have to take the blame. He’d have to spend real money to fix the system, and it might also affect growth metrics—when a big ship is involved, turning it is hard, and once the movement starts, it draws everything along.

Think about it—could someone like Musk possibly tolerate a product leader saying, “our technology isn’t good enough”?

So there’s only one optimal solution: shift the blame onto “Chinese state-level water army.” And doing it that way has several advantages:

Exemption: It’s not that our technology is bad—it’s that the opponent is too strong, and it’s a state-level action.

Establishing persona: X is “defending global free speech,” which fits Musk’s narrative, and can also win some goodwill.

Making a show of loyalty: to the U.S. regulatory authorities / Congress—saying, look, we’re fighting foreign interference, so perhaps policies will have fewer hassles in the future.

So, you tell me—doesn’t this kind of deal look like a surefire win?

The second chain: I think it’s the Silicon Valley venture capital and geopolitical interests chain. After all, his own backers rely on “taking sides” to consolidate.

Nikita isn’t only X’s product leader; as we mentioned earlier, he’s also a partner at Lightspeed venture capital. Lightspeed is a typical Silicon Valley VC. It has invested in American consumer internet products like BeReal and Flo Health, with basically no overlap with Chinese tech companies.

So what is the mainstream narrative in Silicon Valley right now?

China is a systemic rival. TikTok bans, data security reviews, supply-chain decoupling—any one of these pushes China into the “enemy” position. In that atmosphere, any “large-scale abnormal behavior” coming from China is automatically assumed, by default, to be “state behavior.” So this isn’t just a matter of prejudice anymore—it’s a matter of survival logic.

In fact, the X platform itself is caught in the squeeze between China-U.S. game dynamics. It wants to be a “global digital square” and earn money from global traffic, but it also doesn’t want to be accused by the U.S. Congress of “tolerating China’s influence.”

So I think Nikita’s blame-shifting fits perfectly into the position of political correctness: it helps Musk take the side, while not affecting X’s gray-market traffic in China. (After all, gray-market users probably won’t pay Premium, so X can’t make money off them anyway.)

Of course, I also think that for Nikita personally, there’s an additional invisible benefit: in the Silicon Valley VC circle, “going head-to-head with China” is a plus. It can improve his personal reputation, making it easier to get projects and raise funds later.

The third chain: it’s the traffic-harvesting chain of China’s gray-and-black industries—and it’s the real world he can’t understand.

In fact, China’s internet gray industries are no longer small-scale operations.

I found last year’s data. According to the data for the first quarter of 2025, the domestic black-and-gray market size in China exceeded 2800 billion yuan, with over 8 million practitioners. It has formed a complete interest chain covering intermediary referrals, technical support, legal disguises, and fund splitting. These people, in practice, have nothing to do with “state behavior.” They only recognize one thing: ROI (return on investment)—what we call it.

If one scam link earns a few cents per click, and one porn stream referral earns a few yuan, and one account can post several hundred messages per day—then as long as they can recoup costs, someone will definitely do it. Because X has relatively lenient moderation and has huge global traffic, it has become their new battleground. It’s not that they fundamentally don’t want to attack X; it’s just that they want to make some money on X.

So these black industries have no direct command relationship with official authorities. In fact, authorities are cracking down hard on VPNs and scams domestically.

But during “politically sensitive periods,” they do amplify operations, because users’ attention is high then, and scam success rates are higher.

Nikita can’t understand this chain:

Because he hasn’t built products in China, and he hasn’t seen the underlying logic of “running scripts for 0.1 yuan clicks for 24 hours.” He only sees “5–10 million accounts erupt on schedule,” and therefore thinks it’s “state behavior”—which is a typical cognition blind spot.

So, based on my analysis, you can understand this: Nikita himself isn’t simply a “racist.” He’s just a person defined entirely by the economic chain he’s in.

That is, his triple identity as an American growth hacker, a Silicon Valley VC, and a U.S. platform executive naturally leads him to interpret “scaled Chinese anomalies” as a geopolitical threat, rather than business gray-market activity.

So this is a classic “stance determines cognition.” Seated in that position, holding those resources, with those cognitions in his head, the words he speaks can only come out like that.

So this isn’t, in fact, just Nikita’s personal problem. I think it’s more the inevitable result of a mismatch between the U.S.-China digital economy industry chains, along with the platform’s governance costs being shifted onto others.

X wants to enjoy the global traffic dividend, but doesn’t want to pay the real money-and-sweat costs required for governing multilingual gray-market activity.

China’s gray-and-black industries want to make quick global money, but they treat the platform like a free traffic pool.

Neither side wants to pay for “public goods” (a clean digital square). In the end, it turns into each side shifting blame to the other: you say I’m a “state-level attack,” I say you’re “not good enough technically.” Neither wants to back down, and neither wants to solve the problem.

So the ones who ultimately suffer are ordinary users who want to see real information and communicate normally on X. That’s what makes this whole thing most frustrating and helpless.