X is reducing payments to accounts that are “flooding their timelines” with clickbait and rapid news gathering, according to Nikita Bier, head of product at X.
“(A)ll aggregators have reduced their payouts by 60% this cycle,” Bier wrote on Saturday, noting that there will be a further 20% reduction in the next pay cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network would reduce payments to “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨breaking’ in every post.”
Bier added, “It has become abundantly clear that flooding your timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait will crowd out real creators and hinder the growth of new writers. X will never infringe language or reach, but we will not compensate for program or user manipulation.”
Bier’s comments came after a number of conservative news accounts began posting that they had received an email from X informing them that their accounts had been demonetized.
Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre, said: “🔥🚨Breaking news(…) I was the first creator to go unmonetized on this platform and have been for a whole year. I got my money back and lost it with no insight. How is this possible? I’m one of the hardest working creators on X.”
McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers on X. He first rose to prominence by posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, and although he was temporarily banned from
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained that X seemed to be listening to “complaints from people who had no purpose for making this app.” And while he acknowledged that declaring every post as breaking news would be “clickbait,” he insisted: “I’ve posted hundreds of times and there are very few breaking news posts.” (Some users of
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Other users claimed they were caught up in X’s crackdown through an account called PoliMath. “I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there, but I’m a little nervous that I’ve somehow gotten stuck in this ‘aggregator’ bucket because I’ve had the lowest payout for a long time.” The account acknowledged having a paid partnership with Kalshi but said it was “not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination.”
Bier’s comments come after renewed debate over the value of the X platform. Nate Silver, a data analyst and expert, complained about how difficult it has become to drive traffic from X to other websites. He also pointed to the dominance of right-wing accounts over
Bier claimed Silver’s data was inaccurate, and Musk called his post “bullshit.” But other analyzes supported his claim.
