X says it is working to reduce payouts to clickbait accounts

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Bear wrote on Saturday “(A)ll the aggregators have had their payments reduced to 60% this cycle” and said they would see another 20% reduction in the next payment cycle. He also said that the Elon Musk-owned social network will reduce payments for “the usual bait stickers that use ‘🚨break’ in every post.”

“It’s becoming abundantly clear: flooding your timeline with 100’s of stolen reposts and clickbait every day is crowding out real creators and hurting the growth of new authors,” Pierre said, adding that “X will never infringe on speech or reach — but we will never compensate for manipulating the software or our users.”

Pierre’s comments came after a number of conservative news reports began Posted that they received emails from X To notify them that their account has been de-verified.

Dominic McGee, who publishes under the name Doom Locker, books“🔥🚨BREAKING (…) I was the first creator to be unmonetized on this platform and I was like that for a whole year. I got it back and just lost it without any idea. How could this be possible? I’m one of the hardest working creators on X.”

McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers on X. He first became famous for posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, and while he was temporarily banned from X in 2023 and demonetized in 2024, He told the New York Times last year He was earning $55,000 a year from the platform.

In response to Pierre’s post… McGee complained X seems to be listening to “complaints of people who had no purpose in creating this app.” While he acknowledged that advertising every post as breaking news would be “clickbait,” he claimed: “I post hundreds of times and very few of them are breaking news.” (Some X users apparently disagree, as they added a community note noting the 91 times he used the word “broken” in the past week.)

Other users claimed to have been caught up in X’s crackdown, with An account named PoliMath Post“I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there but I just got my lowest return in a long time so I’m a little nervous that I’ve somehow fallen into this ‘collectors’ bucket.” The account said they are “in no way ‘aggregators’,” though they acknowledged having a paid partnership with Calci.

Bear’s comments also came afterward A new round of debate about the value of the X platformwhere data analyst and critic Nate Silver complained about how difficult it was to drive traffic from X to other websites. Him too He pointed out the dominance of right-wing accounts on X“I suppose I have some intuition about how bad it could be,” he declared, “but gosh, this is what you get when the ecosystem crashes.”

Pierre claimed that Silver’s data was not accurate, and Musk called his posts “nonsense.” Other analyses He owns supported his claims.