X to cut payments for accounts posting clickbait content

X is scaling back payments to accounts that overwhelm users' feeds with clickbait and high-volume reposted content, according to its head of product Nikita Bier.

Bier stated on Saturday that "all aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle," adding that an additional 20% cut will be applied in the next payout round. He also noted that the platform will decrease earnings for "habitual bait posters who use 'BREAKING' on every post."

"It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait every day crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth," Bier said. He emphasised that "X will never infringe on speech or reach — but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users."

His remarks followed reports from several conservative-focused news accounts claiming they had received notifications from X about demonetisation.

Dominick McGee, known on the platform as Dom Lucre, posted: "BREAKING […] I was the first creator to be demonetised on this platform, and I was for an entire year. I got it back, but I haven't seen any insight. How could this be possible? I am one of the hardest-working creators on X."

McGee, who has around 1.6 million followers, initially gained attention for sharing conspiracy-related content tied to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Although he faced a temporary ban in 2023 and demonetisation in 2024, he told The New York Times last year that he had been earning approximately $55,000 annually from the platform.

Responding to Bier's announcement, McGee argued that X appeared to be reacting to "the complaints of people who have no goal in creating on this app." While he admitted that labelling every post as breaking news would count as clickbait, he maintained, "I post hundreds of times, and very few are BREAKING." However, some users disputed this, with a community note highlighting that he had used the term "BREAKING" 91 times in a single week.

Other users also suggested they may have been affected by the policy shift. An account named PoliMath wrote, "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 insisted it was "not an 'aggregator' by any stretch of the imagination," though it acknowledged having a paid partnership with Kalshi.

The discussion comes amid renewed debate over the overall value of X as a platform. Data analyst Nate Silver recently criticised how difficult it has become to drive traffic from X to external websites. He also pointed to what he described as the growing dominance of right-leaning accounts, stating, "I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken."

Bier rejected Silver's conclusions, saying the data was inaccurate, while Elon Musk dismissed the claims as "bullshit." Despite that pushback, other independent analyses have supported concerns about declining referral traffic and broader changes within the platform's ecosystem.