Elon Musk’s X reduces creator payments for clickbait and news aggregators

Elon Musk’s X has reduced payments to users who post clickbait and recycle news stories as it warned account holders against “flooding the timeline” with low-quality content.

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, wrote on the social media platform that all “aggregators” – users who quickly repackage and repost news from other accounts – had received less money from the creator revenue sharing programme.

Under the scheme, X gives a share of advertising revenue to creators who have at least 500 verified followers and generate at least 5m views over a three-month period. Bier wrote that aggregators had their payouts reduced by 60% and that total will be reduced by a further 20%.

“It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth,” he wrote.

Bier added that a permanent deduction in payments will be imposed on people who use “🚨BREAKING” on every post on X, formerly called Twitter, which Musk acquired in a $44bn deal in 2022.

“X will never infringe on speech or reach – but we will not compensate for manipulation of the programme or our users,” Bier added.

His weekend post came after several rightwing influencers said their payments had been stopped. Dominick McGee, who posts conspiracy theory content on X under the name Dom Lucre and has 1.6m followers, wrote on Saturday that he had been demonetised “without any insight”.

McGee also posted what appeared to be a message from X stating that he had been removed from the creator revenue sharing programme due to “violations of our creator monetisation standards”.

Last year the New York Times reported that McGee was making $55,000 a year from X, a comparatively low figure given his 9am to 8pm work schedule.

Ethan Levins, whose X profile describes himself as an “independent journalist” and “truth seeker”, said the platform had pulled payments despite his account receiving no censure for posting violating content.

Another account named PoliMath, which denied it was a content aggregator, 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.”

Candace Owens, a rightwing US commentator who has been criticised for touting outlandish conspiracy theories, replied to Bier’s post with the comment “this is a good policy”.

Bier said in a separate post at the weekend that X was trialling new tools that would “identify original authors of content” and allocate “a portion of revenue to them”. He added that reposts would always be a core part of X but that the revenue sharing scheme should incentivise high-quality, original material.

In an interaction with the Daily Loud account, which is labelled an outlet for “viral news across the planet”, Bier wrote: “You copy and paste. You do not add any unique commentary … You are welcome to continue to do this, but it does not create any business value for X or enrich our timeline.”