GoKawiilX is cutting back on payments to accounts that are “flooding the timeline” with clickbait and rapid-fire news aggregation, according to its head of product Nikita Bier
Bier wrote Saturday that “[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle” and said they’ll see another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network will be reducing payments for “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ on every post.”
“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.”
Bier’s comments came after a number of conservative news accounts began posting that they’d received emails from X notifying them that their accounts had been demonetized.
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. He first became popular 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 that he was making $55,000 a year from the platform.
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained that X seemed to be listening to “the complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app.” And 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.” (Some X users appear to disagree, adding a community note linking to 91 times he’d used the word “BREAKING” in the past week.)
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