X, formerly Twitter, has announced a significant shift in how it distributes creator revenue, reducing payments to aggregator accounts while directing a greater share of earnings toward original content creators, in what the platform describes as an effort to clean up its home feed and reward genuine creative effort.

According to a post by Nikita Bier, X’s Head of Product, the platform has begun testing new tools designed to identify the original authors of content and allocate a portion of revenue directly to them.

“For this creator payout cycle, we are experimenting with new tools to identify original authors of content and allocating a portion of revenue to them,” Bier wrote, adding that the platform’s revenue sharing programme should reward the effort it takes to produce something rather than simply the poster who helped it travel furthest.

The announcement comes with concrete financial consequences for accounts that primarily aggregate and repost content rather than create it. X has reduced payments to aggregator accounts by 60 percent for the current payout cycle, with an additional 20 percent reduction planned for the following cycle.

Bier was direct about the reasoning behind the change, stating that it had become clear to the X team that flooding the timeline with what he described as stolen reposts and clickbait every day had crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth. “If you get out and record content, you will be rewarded,” Bier said in a reply to his initial post.

Bier also called out a specific behaviour that X intends to penalise going forward the habitual use of the word BREAKING on posts regardless of whether the content warrants it. He described this practice as a manipulation of the programme and its users, and confirmed that X is planning to assign a permanent deduction to accounts that engage in this kind of bait posting.

The platform is positioning this as part of its broader effort to ensure that its creator revenue sharing programme incentivises original, high-quality content that brings new value to the timeline rather than rewarding accounts that simply amplify what others have already created.

Bier acknowledged the genuine creative work that has been produced on the platform, citing specific examples including investigative content that uncovered significant financial fraud, studio quality video parody and insightful long form articles on technology and artificial intelligence, as evidence of the kind of original creation the new policy is designed to encourage and protect. He was clear that reposts and user commentary would remain a core pillar of X’s ecosystem, but that the revenue sharing programme specifically needed to reflect a different set of values.

The announcement adds to a pattern of changes X has introduced over the past year aimed at improving the quality of its home feed and the experience of its in-stream advertising environment. These have included restricting hashtags and URLs in ad text, limiting emojis per advertisement and introducing Paid Partnership labels on posts from creators involved in in-feed advertising. The latest changes to creator payouts also follow a separate controversy from three weeks earlier, when X said its revenue sharing policies were under review after Elon Musk paused a regional weighting update that would have calculated creator earnings based more heavily on impressions from a creator’s home region and neighbouring countries. That policy was designed to reduce what X described as a growing problem of creators and bot networks deliberately targeting high-value advertising markets such as the United States and Japan to artificially inflate their earnings.