X has launched a pointed offensive against accounts that overwhelm the timeline with rapid-fire reposts, stolen content, and cheap clickbait, delivering a sharp cut to their monetization rewards.
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, announced the changes Saturday in a post that left little doubt about the platform’s frustration.
“All aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle,” he wrote, adding that they face another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle.
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The company is also trimming payments to “habitual bait posters who use ‘BREAKING’ on every post.”
Bier made the reasoning explicit: “It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth.”
He was careful to draw a line between speech and compensation. X will never infringe on speech or reach — but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users,” he said.
The move came after a fresh wave of conservative news accounts publicly complained they had received emails notifying them of demonetization. One of the most vocal was Dominick McGee, who posts as Dom Lucre and boasts 1.6 million followers.
McGee, who first gained prominence peddling conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, fired back: “BREAKING […] 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.”
McGee, who once told The New York Times he was earning roughly $55,000 a year from the platform before earlier demonetization spells, accused X of listening too closely to outsiders.
“The complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app,” he complained.
While conceding that constant “BREAKING” labels amount to clickbait, he insisted his output was mostly legitimate.
“I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING,” he said.
Community notes on his account told a different story, linking to a tally of 91 uses of the word in the past week alone.
Others worried they had been swept up in the dragnet. PoliMath, an analytical account with a paid partnership to the prediction market Kalshi, posted: “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.”
He added that he is “not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination.”
The timing of Bier’s announcement amplified an already heated debate about X’s health as a content and traffic engine. Data analyst Nate Silver recently lamented how difficult it has become to drive meaningful visitors from X to external websites, while highlighting the platform’s heavy tilt toward right-wing voices.
“I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken,” Silver wrote.
Bier pushed back, calling Silver’s data inaccurate. Elon Musk weighed in more bluntly, dismissing the posts as “bullshit.” Yet multiple independent analyses have echoed Silver’s core observation that traffic patterns and audience composition have shifted markedly since Musk took over.
For X, the payout adjustments represent a calculated trade-off. The platform’s creator revenue program has been central to keeping power users engaged and encouraging posting volume. But executives clearly concluded that the deluge of low-effort aggregation and alarmist headlines was crowding out original voices, stifling new talent, and ultimately damaging the user experience.
By refusing to subsidize what it views as manipulation, X is betting that a cleaner, higher-quality timeline will prove more valuable in the long run — even if it means some of its most prolific posters take a financial hit.