X says it is tightening its creator revenue-sharing program by paying less to accounts that flood the platform with clickbait, recycled news, and rapid-fire aggregation.
The change was announced by Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, who said all aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle and that they will face “another 20% reduction” in the next pay cycle.
He also said X will reduce payments for “habitual bait posters who use ‘BREAKING’ on every post.”
X says low-quality aggregation has crowded out original creators
Bier framed the change as a correction to the platform’s incentives. He wrote that flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday had crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth.
He added that X will never infringe on speech or reach, but said the company would no longer compensate for manipulation of the program or our users. The Guardian described the policy as a move to reward original creators while penalizing aggregators for flooding timelines with “stolen posts.
The creator revenue-sharing program itself remains significant on the platform.
The Guardian reported that X shares advertising revenue with creators who have at least 500 verified followers and generate at least 5 million views over a three-month period. That means the latest crackdown is not about content moderation alone; it directly affects a payment system that some high-volume accounts have treated as a business model.
Some right-wing influencers say they were caught in the cuts
The announcement came after several conservative and right-wing accounts said they had been demonetized.
TechCrunch reported that Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre, said, “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.”
McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers and that he posted what appeared to be a message from X saying he had been removed from the program for violations of our creator monetization standards.
The financial stakes are not trivial. McGee shared that last year, he was making $55,000 a year from X, which is comparatively low given what it described as his 9am to 8pm work schedule. The disagreement around the crackdown therefore reflects more than wounded pride; it hits an income stream that some creators had come to rely on.
X says it wants to identify and reward original authors
The company appears to be pairing the payout cuts with new tools designed to favor more original material. Bier said X is trialing features that would identify original authors of content and allocate a portion of revenue to them. He also said reposts would remain a core part of X, but argued that the revenue-sharing system should incentivize high-quality, original material.
Bier was even more direct in an interaction with the Daily Loud account: “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.”
That line makes clear the platform is not banning aggregation outright. It is saying that low-effort aggregation may still be allowed, but it will no longer be rewarded at the same level.
A monetization reset, not a speech crackdown
The policy is likely to please some users and anger others.
Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator, replied that “this is a good policy,” while other accounts such as PoliMath worried they may have been wrongly swept into the “aggregators” bucket.
The broader message from X is that it wants to preserve repost culture while reshaping who gets paid for it.
In that sense, this is less a speech crackdown than a monetization reset — one that could change which kinds of accounts thrive on the platform next.
