By Epiphanus Obia
X has removed nearly 4,000 accounts from its creator revenue-sharing program and detected 1.5 million duplicated posts in a fresh crackdown aimed at ensuring more advertising revenue goes to original content creators rather than users who rely on engagement bait or recycled content.
The measures, announced on Thursday by X Head of Product Nikita Bier, introduce tougher enforcement against two practices the platform says have undermined the creator ecosystem: repeatedly posting messages designed to artificially boost engagement and republishing other people’s content with minor edits to earn revenue.
Under the new rules, creators who post engagement-soliciting messages such as “I’ll follow everyone who replies” three or more times will be removed from the revenue-sharing programme, while their accounts will also be referred to X’s policy team for possible suspension. Bier said the platform’s AI assistant, Grok, can now automatically detect such posts.
In a separate update, X said it has significantly improved its ability to identify duplicated content. According to Bier, the new detection model is three times more effective than its predecessor and can recognise copied posts even when users attempt to disguise them by adding watermarks, introductory clips or other minor edits.
Rather than rewarding the account that reposts a viral post first, X said monetised impressions generated by duplicated content will now be credited to the original creator. The company said it identified about 1.5 million stolen posts during the latest payment cycle and expects the changes to redirect more than $1 million in creator payouts back to the original authors.
Bier added that creators who repeatedly or deliberately try to circumvent the system risk being removed from the programme altogether. However, he said X would not penalize users who posted engagement-soliciting messages earlier this week while celebrating a recent algorithm update, noting that those posts had been excluded from enforcement.
The changes mark the latest step in X’s efforts to reshape its creator economy by rewarding originality over tactics designed to game the platform’s recommendation and monetisation systems.
Since introducing creator revenue sharing, X has repeatedly adjusted how creators are paid in response to concerns about spam, engagement farming and content theft. Earlier this year, the company shifted its payout model to place greater emphasis on impressions from verified users’ Home timelines rather than engagement in replies, a move intended to reduce coordinated reply spam.
The latest enforcement also reflects a broader role for artificial intelligence in platform moderation. While Grok is widely known as X’s conversational AI assistant, the company is increasingly using AI behind the scenes to detect spam, identify copied content and enforce monetisation policies at scale.
The update could have implications for creators worldwide, including those in Nigeria, where many content creators and digital entrepreneurs use X to build audiences and, where eligible, earn revenue through the platform’s creator programme. For those users, the latest changes signal that producing original content may become increasingly important to maintaining both visibility and monetisation opportunities.
X’s creator revenue-sharing programme allows eligible creators to earn a share of advertising revenue generated from their content. The programme forms part of the platform’s wider strategy to attract and retain creators by offering financial incentives while improving the quality and authenticity of content shared on the service.