Elon Musk\u2019s X has reduced payments to users who post clickbait and recycle news stories as it warned account holders against \u201cflooding the timeline\u201d with low-quality content.<\/p>\n
Nikita Bier, X\u2019s head of product<\/a>, wrote on the social media platform that all \u201caggregators\u201d \u2013 users who quickly repackage and repost news from other accounts \u2013 had received less money from the creator revenue sharing programme.<\/p>\n Under the scheme, X<\/a> gives a share of advertising revenue to creators who have at least 500 verified followers and generate at least 5m views over a three-month period. Bier wrote that aggregators had their payouts reduced by 60% and that total will be reduced by a further 20%.<\/p>\n \u201cIt became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Bier added that a permanent deduction in payments will be imposed on people who use \u201c\ud83d\udea8BREAKING\u201d on every post on X, formerly called Twitter, which Musk acquired in a $44bn deal in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cX will never infringe on speech or reach \u2013 but we will not compensate for manipulation of the programme or our users,\u201d Bier added.<\/p>\n His weekend post came after several rightwing influencers said their payments had been stopped. Dominick McGee, who posts conspiracy theory content on X under the name Dom Lucre and has 1.6m followers, wrote on Saturday that he had been demonetised \u201cwithout any insight\u201d.<\/p>\n McGee also posted what appeared to be a message from X stating that he had been removed from the creator revenue sharing programme due to \u201cviolations of our creator monetisation standards\u201d.<\/p>\n Last year the New York Times reported that McGee was making $55,000 a year from X, a comparatively low figure given his 9am to 8pm work schedule.<\/p>\n Ethan Levins, whose X profile describes himself as an \u201cindependent journalist\u201d and \u201ctruth seeker\u201d, said the platform had pulled payments despite his account receiving no censure for posting violating content.<\/p>\n Another account named PoliMath, which denied it was a content aggregator, wrote: \u201cI think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there but I just had my lowest payout in a long time so I\u2019m a little nervous that I somehow got caught in this \u2018aggregators\u2019 bucket.\u201d<\/p>\n Candace Owens, a rightwing US commentator who has been criticised for touting outlandish conspiracy theories, replied to Bier\u2019s post with the comment \u201cthis is a good policy\u201d.<\/p>\n Bier said in a separate post at the weekend that X was trialling new tools that would \u201cidentify original authors of content\u201d and allocate \u201ca portion of revenue to them\u201d. He added that reposts would always be a core part of X but that the revenue sharing scheme should incentivise high-quality, original material.<\/p>\n In an interaction with the Daily Loud account, which is labelled an outlet for \u201cviral news across the planet\u201d, Bier wrote: \u201cYou copy and paste. You do not add any unique commentary \u2026 You are welcome to continue to do this, but it does not create any business value for X or enrich our timeline.\u201d<\/p>\n X, which is about to float on US markets as part of Musk\u2019s SpaceX empire<\/a>, has been approached for comment. Bier has made several announcements on misleading or vexatious content, including imposing a payment ban<\/a> on users if they repeatedly post unlabelled AI-generated war videos. He has also pledged to introduce an \u201ciron slopdome\u201d to tackle AI slop on the platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s X has reduced payments to users who post clickbait and recycle news stories as it warned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-604236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}