Elon Musk’s Platform
Nikita Bier, the platform’s head of content, posted Friday that X was allocating a portion of revenue exclusively to original content creators “for this creator payment cycle,” saying the change would enrich the app’s timeline.
“Reposts and comments will always be a core pillar of X, but our revenue sharing program should encourage high-quality, original content that brings new value to the timeline,” Bier wrote. “It means rewarding the effort it takes to produce something, not just the poster that helped it travel the furthest.”
Aggregator accounts mass copy and paste content from other creators or businesses – often without attribution – to drive engagement. Under X’s revenue share program, the more engagement a monetized account receives, the greater its payout.
In a reply posted on SaturdayBier said aggregator accounts saw their payments reduced by 40% in the most recent cycle, with an additional 20% reduction planned for the next. He said it had become clear that such accounts were “crowding out real creators and hurting the growth of new authors.”
“X will never infringe on speech or scope, but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users,” Bier wrote.
The policy has drawn criticism from some creators who have argued that reposting is essential to how content spreads on
“X is the application that posts messages from other applications”, McGee wrote. “If you remove this, it will no longer have the value of being the big validator and creators won’t bother posting ‘original content’ due to the 90% cut, meaning original creators will never explode.”
THE The New York Times profiled McGee last year as an “outrage master” on the platform, where he at one point ranked as the third most influential user. He told the newspaper that his salary of
Others have raised questions about how X defines aggregation. A user who replied to Bier noted that it produces original content as well as occasional rebroadcasts. “Do my occasional reposts make me an aggregator? he asked.
Another account asked Grok, X’s AI chatbot, if it would be classified as an aggregator under the new rules. Grok said it was a low risk accountnoting that it promoted local content and offered substantive answers rather than relying on mass rebroadcasts of third-party information or “BREAK” style bait messages.
Pop culture account Daily Loud called the move “genius” — cynically — arguing that X would pocket the reduced payouts while creators would stay on the platform simply because that’s where their audience is. In a exchange with Bierthe account asked him “who gets the credit for the original work.”
Bier was straightforward: any post that is a republication or originates from a third-party network will be subject to a deduction. “I recommend recording original videos with your own voiceover,” he said. “We want clean new content on the app.”
Bier joined X last summer to lead its product team, announcing the decision in a June post thanking Musk for the role.
In November, he helped launch a location transparency feature that allowed users to see the country or region associated with any account — a tool that Bier said would help “verify the authenticity of content” and reduce the influence of coordinated troll farms. He later acknowledged that the feature was temporarily disabled due to inaccuracies affecting some older accounts, which he attributed to changing IP address ranges over time.
