X moves to stop big accounts from stealing content from smaller creators

X is finally taking a harder look at one of the platform’s most annoying creator problems: big accounts stealing content from smaller creators, reposting it without credit, and walking away with the views, engagement, and, in recent cases, creator payouts.

Nikita Bier, X’s Head of Product, says the company has identified “a number of large accounts” that have been programmatically reuploading content from smaller accounts to game the revenue share program and avoid crediting original creators. X now says it is identifying these copied posts and allocating the impressions entirely to the original creator.

That is a big shift. Previously, if a large account downloaded your video or copied your post and reposted it as if it were theirs, the stolen version could easily outperform the original. The smaller creator got frustration. The thief got traction.

Bier also advised users who want to add commentary to use X’s Share Video or Quote feature, so attribution remains intact. This is important because commentary and reposting are still central to how X works, but X now seems keen to separate genuine amplification from lazy content theft. X had already started experimenting with tools to identify original authors and route more revenue toward them rather than aggregator accounts. In fact, aggregator payouts were cut in a recent cycle as part of the same broader push.

The latest move appears to have been pushed along by a complaint from creator Gene Parmesan, who accused several accounts of ripping his videos and reposting them without attribution. One repost by @kevin_smith45 had reportedly gained far more traction than Gene’s original upload. In response, Bier told Gene that his video being stolen “really bothered” the team and said X is now investing significant engineering resources into models that can detect this behaviour.

For Kenyan and African X users, this problem is painfully familiar. Anyone who spends enough time on the platform has seen small accounts break a joke, share a sharp observation, post a clip, or surface a local story, only for a bigger account to copy it and go viral. Community Notes can sometimes expose the thief, but usually after the stolen post has already done the numbers.

The monetization angle makes it worse. Since X started paying creators, stolen content is no longer just about clout. It can become actual money. That changes the incentive structure, and not in a cute way.

If X gets this right, it could make the platform fairer for original creators, especially smaller accounts that often lack the reach to defend their work. But the real test will be enforcement. Detecting stolen videos is one thing. Catching copied jokes, screenshots, rewritten captions, and local posts lifted without attribution will be much harder.

Still, this is a welcome start. For once, the small account that created the thing might actually get rewarded before the big account that stole it.