Twitter/X
RT Groups Are Dead: What X Operators Should Run Instead After the December Purge
The December purge wasn't a warning shot — it was a funeral, and half the industry still hasn't checked the obituary.
Updated Jun 2026 · sourced from 12 YouTube creators and 8 operator groups
Key takeaways
- Grok 4.1 moderation killed RT groups in Dec 2025; 85+ large trans pages were banned overnight.
- A single nude post can permanently crater account reach — SFW discipline is now non-negotiable.
- Bubble-matching in male niches (MMA, football, gaming) outperforms the saturated OFM bubble.
- X is cheap, low-quality traffic — scaling means many accounts, not one perfected account.
- Comment-baiting, ban funnels, and targeted DMs are the surviving playbook; RT groups are not.
Somewhere in December 2025, an operator watched 85+ large trans X pages vanish in a single sweep. Not shadowbanned.
Gone.
Two separate operator groups, independently, in the same week: RT groups are dead. [g7 · Dec 2025], [g1 · Dec 2025]
That's the event this article is built around. Everything below is what the evidence — vetted and chatter both — says you run instead.
What Actually Happened in December
The December 2025 ban wave wasn't random. Operators in multiple groups flagged Grok 4.1 as the mechanism — the new moderation layer that flagged coordinated inauthentic behavior at scale, and RT groups are, by definition, coordinated inauthentic behavior.
The immediate casualties were NSFW trans pages. But the blast radius was wider: one group reported the broader RT4RT promotional model being reassessed entirely after accounts were hit. [g7 · Dec 2025]
By April 2026, a separate group was stating it plainly: RT groups and RT drops from live accounts can ban your X accounts outright. Prefer niche posting and SFW content instead. [g6 · Apr 2026]
And by May 2026, one group went further: RT groups are almost always scams. Do retweets yourself if you must. [g6 · May 2026]
Three distinct groups. Five months of corroboration.
That's not noise.
Why RT Groups Were Already Broken Before the Purge
Here's the part the vendors selling RT group access never told you.
RT groups were always a reach hack, not a conversion engine. Subscribers from retweet groups tend to be slightly lower quality and are a much easier, faster volume play compared to organic growth. (Patryk, Apr 2026)
The platform itself was always the hostile variable.
Posting borderline content without flagging it risks Twitter marking your account as sensitive media — effectively a shadowban. (Gavin Magoon, Nov 2025) A single nude post can permanently ruin account reach. [g4 · Mar 2026] These two facts together meant RT groups were running accounts hot into a system designed to torch them.
Will Mammone flagged this earlier than most: retweet groups give new accounts a quick boost but can damage account health if used long-term. (Will Mammone, Oct 2025) That was October 2025, before the December purge made it moot.
The tool vendors kept selling. The accounts kept dying.
The Honest State of X as a Traffic Platform
Before the replacement playbook: a clear-eyed look at what X actually is.
X is rated C-tier by at least one well-followed operator-adjacent creator — it works best as mid-funnel nurturing but converts poorly because the male audience on X moves fast. (Hunter Ezra OFM, Feb 2026) Another creator is blunter: X is low-quality but easy and cheap traffic, and scaling it requires many accounts running simultaneously.
One account, one tool, will not produce $100K/month. (Patryk, May 2026)
But it's not dead. Twitter/X remains a viable traffic source and should not be dismissed. (Dr. Hadi Talks, May 2026)
The key word is viable — viable with the right strategy, not the old one.
The Replacement Playbook: Five Things That Actually Work
1. Bubble-Matching: Stop Swimming in the OFM Pond
This is the sharpest strategic shift in the evidence.
The OFM bubble on X is saturated and filled mostly with other creators, not paying fans. (Oliver Smole, May 2026) The play is Phase 1 bubble-matching: grow inside a large, male-dominated, non-OFM niche — football, MMA, UFC, gaming, politics. (Oliver Smole, May 2026)
The catch: the bubble has to match the creator's energy and look. Testing across 20+ creators found only 3–4 bubbles consistently outperform per creator type.
A soft-energy brunette placed in aggressive football culture got zero traction. (Oliver Smole, May 2026)
This isn't a shortcut. It's a fit problem that requires honest assessment before you spend money on Premium accounts.
2. SFW Discipline and the Posting Structure That Survives Moderation
The old playbook — bikini pics, sex emojis in bio, NSFW flag — has been dead since roughly 2022 and is simply more dead now. Posting bikini pics on X gets the account flagged, kills reach via shadowban, and produces roughly 400 impressions. (Oliver Smole, May 2026)
What the evidence supports instead: a structured daily routine. Three to five media posts, one pinned post rotated daily, ten to fifteen reply posts under big accounts, and three to five text tweets.
Morning content should be soft and innocent; afternoon should be reply engagement; evening can show mild suggestive content like bikini. (habibi, Jan 2026)
Profile picture: a selfie showing a little bit of chest, nothing more explicit. (Patryk, Mar 2026) Bio: clean, niche-specific, with a girly or niche-appropriate banner. (Patryk, May 2026)
Twitter Premium is mandatory on every account. It's pay-to-win, and accounts without it get rate-limited. (Patryk, May 2026)
3. Comment-Baiting and Rage-Bait (With Realistic Expectations)
Comment-baiting — replying to popular posts as if in conversation — drives profile visits by exposing your account to large audiences. (Patryk, Mar 2026) Create a monitoring group of large male-audience pages to spot viral posts quickly; early comments on high-traffic posts have the best chance of becoming top comments. (Luca Pritchard, Jul 2025)
High-performing reply strategies include being controversial, genuinely funny, opinion-seeking, playfully flirty, or using a transformation narrative. (habibi, Jan 2026)
Rage-bait commenting on high-follower accounts can generate mass profile visits because even negative engagement exposes you to large audiences. If the account owner replies angrily, their followers see the exchange and some will subscribe. (Patryk, Mar 2026)
The honest caveat: comment-baiting no longer works as well as it used to and cannot generate consistent revenue as a sole source. (Patryk, May 2026) It's a component, not a strategy.
4. The Ban Funnel: Converting Instagram Removals Into X Followers
Every Instagram ban or post deletion is now a follower acquisition event on X — if you move within hours. (Oliver Smole, May 2026)
The script: 'IG just took down my picture again because it was too hot — fight me on X, I'll drop it there.' This frames the ban as urgency and dramatically improves conversion versus a standard link-in-bio prompt. (Oliver Smole, May 2026)
Three ways operators kill this funnel: posting the story too late, burying the X link among multiple bio links, and running it with zero conversion tracking. (Oliver Smole, May 2026) The window closes fast.
Direct link, posted immediately, tracked.
5. Targeted DMs — Carefully
Mass DMs are still cited as a meaningful X traffic driver alongside whatever remains of retweet strategies. (Patryk, May 2026) One operator group reported dead DM accounts recovering after a new proxy plus a one-week wait, with charge rates jumping from 8% to 25–45%. [g2 · Jan 2026] That's meaningful if the recovery is real.
The risk is real too. Mass DM features can cause bans if used too aggressively or too fast; treat them as supplementary traffic on separate accounts, not the primary method. (Patryk, Apr 2026)
Where Operators Disagree: The Unresolved Debates
This is where the evidence gets honest.
RT groups: dead or just scammy? One strand of chatter says RT groups are dead, period. [g1, g7 · Dec 2025] A separate operator, in April 2026, still recommends using RT groups alongside mass DMs — just not low-quality ones, not NSFW, and with niched content. [g6 · Apr 2026] A vetted creator from March 2026 still frames RTR groups as the recommended core strategy, with automation as essential. [Y20, Y27] These positions are genuinely contradictory. The most defensible read: RT groups that survive post-purge are niche, SFW, and carefully run — not the mass NSFW drops that triggered December's wave.
Account scale: many vs. few. One vetted creator recommends only 1–3 managed accounts per model; the old multi-account spam approach leads to shadowbans, low trust, and low conversions. (habibi, Jan 2026) Another creator argues scaling requires many accounts running simultaneously to generate meaningful revenue. (Patryk, May 2026)
One group ran 80 accounts hitting 200K+ views each. [g6 · Dec 2025] These are not compatible strategies. The resolution may be niche-dependent: volume plays for broad niches, quality plays for specific kink or niche content.
Proxy and fingerprinting sensitivity. One operator says organic X runs fine on an antidetect browser with a US proxy. [g1 · Feb 2026] Another says account creation proxy location barely matters for algorithm; X decides reach regardless. [g6 · May 2026] Meanwhile, a vetted creator says run all accounts on real VA devices with genuine human activity to avoid device fingerprinting flags, and that VAs using the same old phone for every account is a primary reason accounts get zero views. (habibi, Jan 2026) One separate group recommends running max two accounts per browser; five on one browser is not advisable. [g4 · Apr 2026] The safest synthesis: fingerprinting risk is real even if proxy location is not the primary variable.
Buying aged accounts: are the followers real? Operators from one group note that cheap 100K+ follower pages are mostly botted followers. [g5 · May 2026] Vetted guidance says target accounts with organic followers, no NSFW label, priced $6–$8 per 1,000 followers, inactive no more than 2–3 weeks, with proportionate impressions. [Y32, Y33] Organic accounts toward 100K are priced at $500–$800 by another operator group. [g2 · May 2026] Discrepancy between those price points and the $6–$8/1K figure is notable. Verify impressions before buying anything.
The Realistic Growth Timeline Nobody Wants to Hear
Zero to 10K followers on X: 12 weeks, if the structure is followed correctly. Around 300 followers by week 2, ~1,700 by week 6, 10K by week 12. (habibi, Jan 2026)
Weeks 1–2: post 1–2x/day with no NSFW, follow models, no retweet groups. Weeks 3–6: increase to 2–3 posts/day and 20–30 follows/day.
Weeks 7–12: scale all activity. (habibi, Jan 2026)
Once an account reaches 1,000–2,000 followers, algorithmic reach improves and compounds. (Luca Pritchard, Jul 2025) That compounding is the actual prize — RT groups were always a shortcut to that number, not a replacement for it.
The Bottom Line
The December 2025 purge didn't kill X as a traffic source. It killed the lazy version of X — the mass NSFW RT drops, the botted follower stacks, the spray-and-pray account spam that was already dying before Grok 4.1 accelerated the process.
What survives: bubble-matched SFW content, comment-baiting on viral posts, the ban funnel converting every IG removal into X followers, and careful DM campaigns on separate accounts. What doesn't: coordinated RT groups at scale, nude posts on main accounts, and the fantasy that one account with one tool prints money.
X is cheap, low-quality, and requires volume. Know that going in, build accordingly, and stop paying for RT group access that gets your accounts torched in the next wave.
Sources
On the record (YouTube creators):
- Luca Pritchard — I Made $150,000 in 30 Days Using Just Reddit & Twitter (No One Talks About This), Jul 2025. Watch ↗
- Patryk — Twitter/X Traffic Guide for OFM (2026), May 2026. Watch ↗
- Dr. Hadi Talks — I Predicted AI OFM Would Die (Here's What's Working Now), May 2026. Watch ↗
- Patryk — Twitter/X Marketing for Onlyfans (2026), Mar 2026. Watch ↗
- Gavin Magoon — 2026 OnlyFans Social Media Updates Every Agency and Creator Should Know, Nov 2025. Watch ↗
- Patryk — The BEST Tool to get subscribers from Twitter/X (OFM), Apr 2026. Watch ↗
- habibi — Onlyfans Twitter Strategy UPDATED 2026**, Jan 2026. Watch ↗
- Oliver Smole — A Complete Guide on OFM Twitter, May 2026. Watch ↗
- Patryk — NEW Twitter/X Traffic Guide for OFM (2026), May 2026. Watch ↗
- Will Mammone — The ACTUAL Best Traffic Method For OnlyFans Creators (forever), Oct 2025. Watch ↗
- Hunter Ezra OFM — ofm marketing tier list, Feb 2026. Watch ↗
Community intelligence: 28 operator claims aggregated from 8 separate private OFM groups (Dec 2025–May 2026), corroboration counted across groups. Group identities are withheld to protect sources; browse the underlying intel in the Community Intel Wiki.