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

Elon Musk led social media platform X (formerly Twitter) is now cracking down on accounts that repost viral videos from small accounts in order to farm engagement and earn revenue via the platform's monetisation 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 says 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 the content on X, wrting : “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 idea behind the new move seems to have stemmed after a recent complaint by a creator on X who noted that his videos were routinely reposted by big accounts without giving him proper credit.

In reponse, an X employee named Allegra Jacchia had said that the big accounts ‘won’t earn from these posts since you are the original owner and poster of the video.’ to reduce it more.” Bier wrote

Notably, the current Creator Revenue Sharing program by X had unintentionally created a copycat econom where big accounts with blue ticks realized that they could make thousands of dollars by simply downloading and reuploading trending videos before the content by original poster could gain traction on the platform.

With the new update, X seems to be fixing the loop and rewards the original poster for their content.

Notably, Bier had earlier founded two viral apps tbh (sold to Meta) and Gas (sold to Discord) and has also worked as a product manager at Meta from 2017 to 2021. Bier had joined X in 2025 and has since worked at bringing various improvements to the platform in order to boost original content.

Bie had also called for creators to make original videos of themselves facing the camera and called it an ‘Easy way to get millions of impressions with basically no followers.’