X Slashes Payouts for Clickbait News Aggregators in New Creator Program Crackdown

X, the Elon Musk-owned social platform, is cutting creator payments for accounts that flood user timelines with clickbait and low-effort rapid news aggregation, according to X Head of Product Nikita Bier.

In a post published Saturday, Bier confirmed that “[a]ll aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle”, with a further 20% payout cut scheduled for the next pay period. The platform is also targeting repeat clickbait offenders, he added, with reduced payments for “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ on every post.”

Bier laid out the core rationale for the policy shift, noting that low-effort mass content was harming the broader creator ecosystem:

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

Bier’s comments followed reports from multiple conservative news accounts that they had received official emails from X notifying them their accounts had been fully demonetized.

One of the highest-profile creators affected is Dominick McGee, who posts under the pseudonym Dom Lucre and has 1.6 million X followers. McGee first gained notoriety for spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 U.S. presidential election. He was temporarily banned from X in 2023, previously demonetized in 2024, and told The New York Times last year he earned roughly $55,000 per year from X’s creator program.

In a post responding to the cuts, McGee 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 pushed back on the new policy, arguing X was prioritizing complaints from non-creating users over the needs of active creators. While he admitted that labeling every post as breaking news qualifies as clickbait, he claimed “I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING.” Other X users quickly challenged that claim, adding a community note to his post linking to evidence he had used the term “BREAKING” 91 times in the preceding week alone.

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Other creators have also reported being incorrectly swept up in X’s new crackdown. One account, PoliMath, wrote that while they supported Bier’s policy goal, they had just received their lowest payout in years and were concerned they had been incorrectly categorized as an aggregator. The account stated it is “not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination,” though it acknowledged it holds a paid partnership with trading platform Kalshi.

Bier’s announcement also landed amid a fresh round of public debate about X’s overall value for creators and publishers. Well-known data analyst and political pundit Nate Silver recently criticized the platform, noting it has become far harder to drive traffic from X to external websites, and highlighting the overwhelming dominance of right-wing accounts on the platform.

“I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken,” Silver wrote.

X leadership pushed back on Silver’s analysis: Bier claimed Silver’s data was inaccurate, and Musk called Silver’s posts “bullshit.” Multiple independent third-party analyses have since backed up Silver’s claims about the platform’s current ecosystem.