According to product director Nikita Beer, X is reducing payments to accounts that are “flooding timelines” with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation.
Beer wrote on Saturday:[a]He said the Elon Musk-owned social network would cut payments to “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ in every post.”
“It’s become abundantly clear: 100 stolen reposts and clickbaits flooding our timelines every day are crowding out real creators and stunting the growth of new authors,” Bier said, adding, “X will never infringe on speech or reach, but it will not compensate for program or user manipulation.”
Beer’s comments came after a number of conservative news accounts began posting that they had received emails from X notifying them that their accounts were no longer monetized.
Dominic Magee, who posts under the name Dom Lecrae, wrote: […] I was the first creator to be demonetized on this platform, and I was like that for a full year. I came back, but I couldn’t find anything and lost it. How is that possible? I’m one of the hardest working creators at X. ”
McGee’s account on X has 1.6 million followers. McGee, who first gained popularity after posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, was briefly banned from X in 2023 and stripped of his earnings in 2024, but told The New York Times last year that he makes $55,000 a year from the platform.
In response to Beer’s post, McGee complained that X seemed to be listening to “complaints from people who have no purpose in creating on this app.” He acknowledged that declaring every post breaking news would be “clickbait” but insisted: “I’ve posted hundreds of times and very few are breaking news.” (Some X users don’t seem to agree with this and have added a link to a community note where he has used the word “BREAKING” 91 times in the past week.)
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Other users claimed to have been caught up in the X crackdown, with an account called PoliMath posting: “I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there, but I just got my lowest payout in a while so I’m a little worried that I somehow got caught up in this ‘aggregator’ bucket.” The account acknowledged that it had a paid partnership with Kalsi, but said, “No matter how you look at it, it is not an ‘aggregator.”
Beer’s comments also come after data analyst and commentator Nate Silver complained about how difficult it has become to drive traffic from X to other websites, sparking a new debate about the value of the X platform. He also pointed to the predominance of right-wing accounts on X, declaring, “I think there was some hunch about how bad it was, but, well, this is what happens when an ecosystem breaks.”
Although Bier claimed Silver’s data was inaccurate and Musk called his post “bullshit,” other analyzes support his claims.
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