X is cutting back on payments to accounts that are “flooding the timeline” with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation, according to 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. ) 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

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