Khaberni - In an initiative aimed at cleansing content and enhancing user experience, platform "X" announced a reduction in payments for accounts that depend on sensational headlines and heavily aggregated content, in an attempt to curb the spread of "Clickbait".
Nikita Bear, the company's Chief Product Officer, said that the platform has already reduced the profits of news aggregation accounts by about 60% in the current cycle, with an additional reduction of 20% planned for the next cycle.
He also mentioned that accounts which excessively use phrases like "🚨Urgent" repeatedly will face similar actions, according to a report published by "Tech Crunch".
He explained that this move came after noticing that "flooding the platform with hundreds of reposted publications daily and misleading headlines led to marginalizing real content creators, and harmed the growth of new users".
Bear affirmed that the platform will not interfere with freedom of expression or reduce access, but it will not reward attempts to manipulate the profits system or exploit users.
These statements come at a time when "X" decisions have sparked a wave of controversy, after several accounts, especially those with conservative leanings, received notifications stating the suspension of their monetization.
Among these is content creator Dominic McGee, who expressed his dissatisfaction with the decision, stating that he lost the monetization feature without sufficient explanations, despite having more than 1.6 million followers on the platform.
"McGee" had previously been known for posting controversial content, including conspiracy theories related to the 2020 American elections, and despite being temporarily banned in 2023 and having his profits stopped in 2024, he revealed in an interview with "The New York Times" that he was making about $55,000 annually from the platform.
Conversely, other users complained about being affected by the new measures, despite not considering themselves among the aggregation accounts, including the account "PoliMath," who expressed concern after recording his lowest return in a long time.
These developments coincide with escalating debates about the value of platform "X", with data analyst Nate Silver criticizing the difficulty of directing traffic from the platform to other sites, pointing to the dominance of accounts with specific political orientations in the scene.
In response, the management of "X" rejected these criticisms, with Bear stating that the data is imprecise, while the platform owner Elon Musk described these allegations as "nonsense", although other analyses support some aspects of it.
This step reflects a clear shift in the policy of "X", which seeks to rebalance between freedom of publishing and content quality, amid increasing competition among social media platforms to attract content creators and advertisers.
