Social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, is significantly cutting payments to accounts that flood users' timelines with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation. The platform's head of product, Nikita Bier, announced the policy shift over the weekend, stating it was necessary to curb manipulation of its creator monetisation programme.

Bier wrote that "[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle" and will see another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle. He also confirmed reductions for "habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ on every post."

Crackdown Follows Creator Complaints

The announcement followed complaints from several prominent conservative news accounts on X, which claimed they had received emails notifying them of demonetisation. Among them was Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre and has 1.6 million followers. McGee, who first gained popularity for posting conspiracy theories about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, stated he had lost his monetisation status "without any insight."

In a post, McGee complained that X appeared to be listening to "the complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app." He acknowledged that overusing 'BREAKING' would be clickbait but claimed, "I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING." However, other X users added a community note to his post linking to 91 instances where he had used the word "BREAKING" in the preceding week.

Defining the Problem and Wider Debate

Explaining the rationale, Bier stated, “It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth.” He emphasised that while "X will never infringe on speech or reach," it "will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users."

The policy change occurred amidst a broader debate about the platform's health and value. Data analyst Nate Silver recently highlighted the difficulty of driving web traffic from X and pointed to the dominance of right-wing accounts, declaring the ecosystem "broken." Bier contested Silver's data, and Elon Musk called the posts "bullshit," though other analyses have supported Silver's observations.

Unintended Consequences and Creator Uncertainty

Some creators expressed concern about being inadvertently caught in the crackdown. An account named PoliMath posted, "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 maintained it is "not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination," though it acknowledged a paid partnership with prediction market platform Kalshi.

The move represents a significant shift in X's approach to its creator monetisation scheme, which was expanded under Musk's ownership to share ad revenue with popular accounts. It underscores an ongoing tension between maximising platform engagement and maintaining content quality.