X is cutting payments to accounts that are “flooding the timeline” with clickbait and rapid news aggregation, according to its head of product Nikita Bier.
Bier wrote on Saturday that “(all) aggregators saw their payments reduced by 60% this cycle” and said they will see another 20% reduction in the next payment cycle. He also said the social network, owned by Elon Musk, will reduce payments to “regular bait publishers who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ in every post.”
“It became very clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait every day was crowding out real creators and hurting the growth of new authors,” Bier said, adding, “X will never infringe on speech or reach, but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users.”
Bier’s comments came after a series of conservative news stories began. post that they had received emails from X notifying them that their accounts had been demonetized.
Dominick McGee, who publishes under the name Dom Lucre, wrote“🔥🚨BREAKING (…) I was the first creator to be demonetized on this platform and I was for a whole year. I got it back and lost it without any idea. How could this be possible? I am one of the hardest working creators on X.”
McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers on X. He first became popular for posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, and although he was temporarily banned from X in 2023 and demonetized in 2024, he told the New York Times last year who earned $55,000 a year with the platform.
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained. that And while he acknowledged that declaring every post to be breaking news would be “click bait,” he said, “I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING NEWS.” (Some X users seem to disagree, adding a community note linking to 91 times he used the word “BREAKING” over the past week.)
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Other users claimed that they were caught up in X’s crackdown, with an account called PoliMath publication“I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there, but I had my lowest payout in a long time, so I’m a little nervous because I somehow got caught up in this ‘aggregator’ group.” The account said they are “not an ‘aggregator’ in any way,” although they acknowledged having a paid partnership with Kalshi.
Bier’s comments also came later a new round of debate about the value of platformwith data analyst and expert Nate Silver complaining about how difficult it has become to drive traffic from X to other websites. he too pointed out the predominance of right-wing accounts in Xstating, “I guess I had some intuition about how bad it was, but geez, this is what happens when the ecosystem is broken.”
Bier claimed that Silver’s data is not accurate and Musk called his posts “nonsense.” other analyzes have supported his claims.
