X is adopting a stricter approach towards individuals who attempt to exploit its creator revenue-sharing program by soliciting engagement and appropriating content from others.

It is not unusual for viral material to be redistributed, particularly on platforms such as X, where that material can garner likes, followers, and, in some situations, actual cash rewards. Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit also face this issue and have introduced various technical measures to mitigate such actions — for example, tools that recognize when a user has re-shared someone else’s work without providing credit.

X has recently joined in on this effort, adding an enhanced video editing and recording feature to its platform to motivate creators to utilize X’s own tools rather than appropriating the work of others.

According to Nikita Bier, X’s latest iteration of the Grok AI model can identify duplicated content at three times the speed of its former version. Moreover, adding watermarks, intros, and other modifications designed to mislead viewers into believing that appropriated content is original will lead to the monetized impressions being credited to the original uploader. This also applies to replicated viral text posts. (Bier mentions that a frequent example of such content is, “Twitter is like the smoking section of the internet”—demonstrating that people are still referring to the app as Twitter!)

Bier indicated that the company has identified 1.5 million instances of content theft in its most recent cycle, although he did not specify the duration of that cycle.

He did, however, mention that as a result of these changes, over $1 million in creator earnings will now be redirected to the original creators of the appropriated content.

Given that many of these issues are facilitated by AI, X has also been working to suspend bots more rapidly. In April, Bier stated that the platform was identifying and suspending “208 bots per minute and increasing.”

X now asserts that repeated or deliberate efforts to bypass its new policy will lead to users being excluded from the creator program, as will attempts to solicit engagement and followers. Specifically, if a user is caught three times or more (for instance, by stating something like “I’ll follow everyone who replies”), their account will be removed from the creator program and referred to the platform’s policy team for suspension.

Bier has previously expressed concerns about engagement bait on the platform, even calling out top creator MrBeast for frequently using financial incentives to attract viewers to his videos.