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

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, we recommend using the Share Video or Quote feature to ensure your posts are properly attributed,” Bier added.

In a subsequent post, Bier also shared the broader vision of how he plans to improve content on X, writing: “It all boils down to: Providing the best tools to create content, incentivizing the highest quality content, ranking that content so it finds its audience. Nothing else matters.”

The move appears to have been triggered by a recent complaint from a creator on X who claimed that his videos were routinely reposted by larger accounts without proper credit.

In response, an X employee named Allegra Jacchia had said that the larger accounts “won’t earn from these posts since you are the original owner and poster of the video.”

Notably, X’s current Creator Revenue Sharing programme had unintentionally created a copycat economy where large verified accounts realised they could make thousands of dollars by simply downloading and reposting trending videos before the original creator’s content gained traction on the platform.

With the new update, X appears to be closing that loophole and rewarding original creators for their content.

Notably, Bier had earlier founded the viral apps tbh, which was later acquired by Meta, and Gas, which was acquired by Discord. He also worked as a product manager at Meta from 2017 to 2021.

Bier joined X in 2025 and has since been working on improving the platform in a bid to encourage more original content.

He had also earlier encouraged creators to make original videos of themselves speaking directly to the camera, calling it an “easy way to get millions of impressions with basically no followers.”