Elon Musk’s X overhauls creator payouts, demonetizes stolen viral videos to crack down on engagement farming

Key points

• X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, is now cracking down on accounts that repost viral videos from smaller creators in order to farm engagement and earn money through the platform's monetisation programme.
• Nikita Bier revamps X creator monetization programme: In a post on X, the platform’s Head of Product Nikita Bier said the company had identified a number of large accounts that “have been programmatically reuploading content from smaller accounts to game the revenue share program and circumvent crediting the original author.” Bier said X will now identify such reposted videos and allocate the impressions entirely to the original creator instead of the account that reuploaded the content.
• He added that users who want to add commentary or reactions to a post should instead use X’s “Share Video” or “Quote” features to ensure proper attribution to the original creator.
• “If you have insightful commentary about a post,...