According to its head of product Nikita Bier, X is reducing payments to accounts that are “flooding the timeline” with clickbait and rapid news aggregation.

Bier stated on Saturday that “[a]ll aggregators had their payouts decreased to 60% this cycle” and mentioned that there will be an additional 20% cut in the upcoming payment cycle. He also noted that the social media platform owned by Elon Musk will be scaling back payments for “frequent bait posters who label every post as ‘🚨BREAKING’.”

“It became increasingly obvious: saturating the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait every day pushed out genuine creators and hindered the growth of new authors,” Bier remarked, adding, “X will never violate free speech or reach — but we will not pay for the manipulation of our program or users.”

Bier’s statements followed reports from several conservative news accounts indicating that they had received notifications from X about their accounts being demonetized.

Dominick McGee, known as Dom Lucre, commented, “🔥🚨BREAKING […] I was the first creator to be demonetized on this platform, and it lasted a whole year. I regained it, only to lose it again without any explanation. How could this happen? I am one of the most dedicated creators on X.”

McGee boasts 1.6 million followers on X. He gained fame by sharing conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, and although he was temporarily banned from X in 2023 and demonetized in 2024, he told The New York Times last year that he was earning $55,000 annually from the platform.

In reaction to Bier’s statement, McGee expressed that X appeared to be catering to “the grievances of individuals who have no intention of creating on this app.” While he acknowledged that labeling every post as breaking news would qualify as “clickbait,” he insisted, “I post hundreds of times, and very few are BREAKING.” (Some users on X seemed to disagree, providing a community note linking to 91 instances where he had used the term “BREAKING” in the previous week.)

Other users asserted that they were affected by X’s crackdown, with an account named PoliMath stating, “I appreciate what Nikita is attempting to achieve, but I just received my lowest payout in a long time, so I’m a bit anxious that I may have inadvertently fallen into the ‘aggregators’ category.” The account claimed they are “not an ‘aggregator’ by any means,” although they recognized having a paid partnership with Kalshi.

Bier’s remarks also came amidst renewed discussion regarding the value of the X platform, with data analyst and commentator Nate Silver lamenting the increased difficulty in redirecting traffic from X to other sites. He highlighted the prevalence of right-leaning accounts on X, stating, “I guess I had some intuition about how bad it was, but wow, this is the outcome of a broken ecosystem.”

Bier contended that Silver’s data is inaccurate, and Musk referred to his posts as “bullshit,” despite other analyses supporting Silver’s assertions.