X Cracks Down on Clickbait Accounts with Payment Reductions

X is taking steps to curb the spread of clickbait on its platform by reducing payments to accounts that engage in such practices. According to Nikita Bier, the head of product at X, all aggregators have seen their payouts reduced to 60% in the current cycle, with another 20% reduction slated for the next pay cycle.

Bier stated, '[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle' and noted that habitual bait posters who use '🚨BREAKING' on every post will also face payment reductions. He explained that flooding the timeline with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation hurts real creators and new author growth.

'It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth,' Bier said, adding, 'X will never infringe on speech or reach — but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users.'

Backlash from Affected Accounts

Some accounts have already begun to feel the effects of X's crackdown. Dominick McGee, who posts under the name Dom Lucre, wrote, '🔥🚨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's account has 1.6 million followers on X and has been a prominent figure in posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election.

McGee responded to Bier's post, stating that X seems to be listening to 'the complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app.' While he acknowledged that declaring every post to be breaking news would be 'clickbait,' he claimed, 'I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING.' However, some X users have disputed this claim, pointing out that McGee has used the word 'BREAKING' 91 times in the past week.

Other users, such as PoliMath, have also expressed concerns about being caught up in X's crackdown. PoliMath stated, '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.' The account emphasized that it is 'not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination,' despite having a paid partnership with Kalshi.

Debate Over X's Ecosystem

Bier's comments come amidst a broader debate about the value of the X platform. Data analyst and pundit Nate Silver has complained about the difficulty of driving traffic from X to other websites, pointing to the dominance of right-wing accounts on the platform. Silver stated, 'I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.' Bier has disputed Silver's data, and Elon Musk has called his posts 'bullshit,' but other analyses have supported Silver's claims.