X says it’s reducing payments to clickbait accounts keeps showing up in conversations for a reason. The story below covers what is actually happening, where the trade-offs sit, and what a careful reader should take from it.
X is cutting back on payments to accounts that are “flooding the timeline” with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation, as reported by its head of product Nikita Bier
Bier wrote Saturday that “[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle” and said they’ll see another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network will be reducing payments for “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ on every post.”
“It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth,” 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 number of conservative news accounts began posting that they’d received emails from X notifying them that their accounts had been demonetized.
Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre, wrote, “🔥🚨BREAKING […] I was the first creator demonetized on this platform and I was for an entire year. I got it back and just lost it without any insight. 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 while he was temporarily banned from X in 2023 and demonetized in 2024, he told The New York Times last year that he was making $55,000 a year from the platform.
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained that X seemed to be listening to “the complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app.” And while he acknowledged that declaring every post to be breaking news would be “clickbait,” he claimed, “I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING.” (Some X users appear to disagree, adding a community note linking to 91 times he’d used the word “BREAKING” in the past week.)
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Other users claimed that they were caught up in X’s crackdown, with an account named PoliMath posting, “I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there but I just had my lowest payout in a long time so I’m a little nervous that I somehow got caught in this ‘aggregators’ bucket.” The account said they are “not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination,” though they acknowledged having a paid partnership with Kalshi.
Bier’s comments also came after a fresh round of debate about the value of the X platform, with data analyst and pundit Nate Silver complaining about how hard it has become to drive traffic from X to other websites. He also pointed to the dominance of right-wing accounts on X, declaring, “I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.”
Bier claimed that Silver’s data isn’t accurate and Musk called his posts “bullshit,” though other analyses have backed up his claims.
