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X is cutting back on payments to accounts that are \u201cflooding the timeline\u201d with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation, according to its head of product Nikita Bier<\/p>\n
Bier wrote Saturday<\/a> that \u201c[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle\u201d and said they\u2019ll see another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network will be reducing payments for \u201chabitual bait posters who use \u2018\ud83d\udea8BREAKING\u2019 on every post.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth,\u201d Bier said, adding, \u201cX will never infringe on speech or reach \u2014 but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users.\u201d<\/p>\n Bier\u2019s comments came after a number of conservative news accounts began posting that they\u2019d received emails from X<\/a> notifying them that their accounts had been demonetized.<\/p>\n Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre, wrote<\/a>, \u201c\ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udea8BREAKING [\u2026] 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.\u201d<\/p>\n McGee\u2019s 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<\/a> that he was making $55,000 a year from the platform.<\/p>\n In response to Bier\u2019s post, McGee complained<\/a> that X seemed to be listening to \u201cthe complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app.\u201d And while he acknowledged that declaring every post to be breaking news would be \u201cclickbait,\u201d he claimed, \u201cI post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING.\u201d (Some X users appear to disagree, adding a community note linking to 91 times he\u2019d used the word \u201cBREAKING\u201d in the past week.)<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Other users claimed that they were caught up in X\u2019s crackdown, with an account named PoliMath posting<\/a>, \u201cI think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there but I just had my lowest payout in a long time so I\u2019m a little nervous that I somehow got caught in this \u2018aggregators\u2019 bucket.\u201d The account said they are \u201cnot an \u2018aggregator\u2019 by any stretch of the imagination,\u201d though they acknowledged having a paid partnership with Kalshi.<\/p>\n Bier\u2019s comments also came after a fresh round of debate about the value of the X platform<\/a>, 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<\/a>, declaring, \u201cI suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.\u201d<\/p>\n Bier claimed that Silver\u2019s data isn\u2019t accurate and Musk called his posts \u201cbullshit,\u201d though other analyses<\/a> have backed up his claims<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n