X tightens promotion rules, the era of encrypted Twitter and wild marketing is over? 】 Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow. On February 21st, Nikita Bier, the product manager of X, publicly requested the poster to supplement the statement that this is a paid promotion, otherwise the account will be banned. This post is from the account @ infodexx, and the content is a ranking of the "Most Valuable Startup Companies of 2025", predicting that the market platform Kalshi ranks second with a valuation of $11 billion. The post received over 420000 views, but the poster's profile stated 'Kalshi partner', and the post itself did not have any paid promotion labels at the beginning. Subsequently, some users marked it as commercial promotion content through X's Community Notes feature (a fact checking mechanism for user collaboration, where the approved comments are directly displayed below the post), which is essentially soft advertising. Bier subsequently announced that X will launch a paid promotion disclosure feature next week, requiring all posts containing paid partnerships to be marked, and violators will have their accounts suspended. The poster later added a background message after the original post, indicating that this is a paid promotion. And mandatory disclosure is just the latest step in this round of adjustments. In the past five months, X has cleared 1.7 million junk marketing information bots, blocked API permissions for InfoFi applications, launched anti automation detection mechanisms, and restricted programmatic reply interfaces Although these actions are scattered at different time points, they are pieced together to form a clear timeline. The era of savage marketing on encrypted Twitter may be coming to an end by the platform itself. In the past 5 months, Mingpai has cut 6 knives in response to changes in marketing rules for the encryption marketing artery X. We have summarized the important time nodes and key moments of the entire rule change as follows: First knife: Garbage robots. In October 2025, Bier announced that X had cleared 1.7 million reply garbage robots within a week, which was the largest cleanup since Musk's acquisition. The main target is automated accounts related to encryption, and anyone who has browsed encrypted posts on X has seen them: scam links that reply in seconds under popular posts, fake accounts disguised as Elon Musk, and generic "gm" robots. Clearing 1.7 million is just the first step, the problems behind it are much bigger. The proliferation of robots such as InfoFi and the "post to earn tokens" model is largely due to InfoFi. Third party platforms track users' posts and interactions on X and reward them with tokens or points. The original intention was to incentivize the production of valuable information, but when posting itself can make money, things have evolved into a situation where the quantity of posts outweighs the quality. Robot farms and AI generated responses quickly dominated the rankings. The largest project, Kaito, had over 157000 active users during the peak period of its Yaps product. By January 9, 2026, CryptoQuant has detected 7.75 million encrypted posts on X in a single day, which is 12 times the normal level. On January 15, 2026, Bier announced a modification to the developer API policy, prohibiting all applications that "reward users for posting on X" and immediately revoking relevant API permissions. Kaito immediately shut down Yaps, causing the token KAITO to drop by about 17% on that day; Cookie DAO has shut down similar product Snap; The entire InfoFi sector lost approximately $40 million in market value in a day. On February 13th, Bier announced the launch of a new round of automated testing for accounts that simulate human operations. If there is no real person clicking on the screen, this account and all associated accounts may be banned. The target of this knife is no longer just traditional robots, but all accounts operated through scripts, automated tools, or AI agents. Bier stated that X will support compliant proxy usage scenarios in the future, but until the rules are clear, it is recommended that developers suspend access and use official APIs if necessary. The fourth knife: The first three knives of Soft Guang deal with automation and junk content, while the fourth knife targets a larger gray area: paid promotion without labeling. Those who often read encrypted Twitter know that this is almost a common practice in the cryptocurrency industry. In September 2025, blockchain investigator ZachXBT released a table listing the promotional quotes and payment wallet addresses of over 200 cryptocurrency KOLs. About 160 people accepted the promotion, but less than 5 people marked "advertisement" in the post. On January 22nd, application researcher Nima Owji discovered the Paid Promotion tag feature being developed in the backend code of X. When creators post, they need to check whether it is a paid promotion, and the tag will be displayed directly on the post. By the time Bier personally intervened in the Kalshi post on February 21st, this feature was already ready to go live. He also announced the launch of the "Made with AI" label, which requires AI generated content to also be labeled. Fifth Step: Predictive Market Promotion Following the announcement of the disclosure function, X updated its paid partner policy, clearly categorizing predictive markets (such as Kalshi and Polymarket) as gambling products and completely prohibiting undisclosed related advertising promotions. On February 23rd, Kalshi voluntarily removed its promotional partner badge on X. Its spokesperson stated that the execution difficulty was too high, and users could easily mistake accounts with badges for official endorsement by Kalshi. The sixth knife: programmatic response. The last knife fell on February 24th. The X developer platform announced restrictions on automatic replies sent through APIs. Programmatic replies are only allowed when the original author @ mentions or references the account. The product owner Bier stated that this is the first step in clearing the robot action, which is to block the largest entrance first. From robots to incentive mechanisms, from automated tools to hidden advertising, from specific category promotion to programmatic interfaces, X's control over encrypted content progresses layer by layer. Combined together, the entire marketing infrastructure that has powered encrypted Twitter over the past few years has been systematically dismantled. X refuses to engage in prostitution for free and welcomes payment. These rule changes combined are changing the cost structure of encrypted marketing. In the past few years, the main ways for encryption projects to gain customers on X have been through three free channels: the InfoFi platform incentivizes users to post and increase their voice, KOLs accept implicit promotion without labeling advertisements, and automated tools generate bulk traffic under popular posts. Now, all three pipelines are either restricted or closed. At the same time, X's algorithm is widening the visibility gap between paid and free accounts. Premium users receive 2 to 4 times the weight bonus in the For You information flow and reply ranking. A creator test found that after March 2025, the median interaction rate of non Premium accounts posting external links has approached zero. The organic reach of encrypted content shrinks even earlier. Cryptocurrency trader Lisa Edwards analyzed in a post in December 2025 that after the algorithm update that month, the reach rate of posts containing token symbols such as BTC and ETH decreased by about 80%. At the same time, the free channel is blocked and the paid channel is open. X's policy for placing encrypted advertisements has actually been relaxing. According to the official advertising policy update log of X, DeFi product advertisements have been approved for placement since 2024, blockchain game advertisements have been opened in the United States and Brazil, and the applicable markets for cryptocurrency exchange and wallet advertisements have expanded from the original dozen to Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Ghana, Kenya and other countries. According to AWISEE statistics, X's approval rate for encrypted ads is about 60%, the highest among mainstream platforms, Meta is about 50%, and Google has a lower rate and explicitly prohibits DeFi type ads. On one hand, free distribution is systematically compressed, while on the other hand, the categories and markets for paid advertising are continuously expanding. This is the monetization path that all content platforms have gone through: first, cultivate a free content ecosystem to attract users and creators, and gradually tighten organic distribution after network effects are established and creators become dependent on the platform, directing traffic towards paid channels. Facebook did exactly the same thing to the brand homepage in 2014, which naturally plummeted from double digits to single digits, forcing the brand to shift from content operation to advertising. What X is doing with encrypted content now is essentially the same set of operations. Who pays, who gets out? The free pipeline will be cut, and the bill will ultimately be shared among every role in the industry. This has at least three layers of impact on the marketing of the cryptocurrency industry. Firstly, the cost of acquiring customers has increased. Previously, an encryption project could rely on InfoFi points to motivate tens of thousands of people to help it generate buzz on X, but now this path is lost. Formal KOL promotion will be more transparent after the disclosure function is launched, but the trust and interaction rate of posts marked with "advertising" will be discounted. The project party will either increase the budget to supplement the quantity or accept a reduction in effectiveness. Secondly, the KOL economy is re pricing. The data exposed by ZachXBT last year showed that more than 160 KOLs accepted promotions but almost no one disclosed them, with single quotes ranging from a few hundred to 60000 US dollars. After mandatory disclosure, the operational space of "appearing like tap water but actually advertising" will be compressed, and the pricing logic of KOLs will shift from "I can help you disguise as organic content" to "how much conversion can my annotated advertisements bring". The former is information gap pricing, while the latter is effect pricing. For the industry, this may not necessarily be a bad thing, but in the short term, there will be a group of KOLs and agencies that rely on ambiguous areas for survival to be eliminated. Thirdly, the platform relies on risk to be re priced. When Bier banned InfoFi, they advised the banned developers to 'transition to Threads and Bluesky'. The product manager of a platform publicly advised developers to compete with other products, stating that X does not mind the diversion of encryption projects and is even actively promoting them. After this round of changes, for the project team and KOLs, putting all their social assets on X platform is not conservative, but risky. For ordinary users, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In the past, when browsing encrypted Twitter posts, six out of ten posts may have been paid for, but none of them would tell you. After the disclosure function is launched, it can at least distinguish which one is promotion and which one is true viewpoint. The information environment has become cleaner, and the cost of judgment will also decrease. Of course, the timing of rule tightening is also in a bear market. The bear market itself will compress marketing budgets, and the number of projects willing to spend money on promotion will decrease, resulting in a quiet flow of information. Whether a clean environment is brought about by rules or coldness can only be truly tested when the bull market returns. Anyway, whether it's the project team, KOLs, or ordinary creators, now they want to be seen on encrypted Twitter, and ticket prices are rising. The logic of this business used to be 'whoever has the loudest voice wins', but in the future it will become' whoever is willing to pay has the voice '.