You don't have to own Bitcoin to make money from people getting excited about it. On X, just posting about it can be a business in itself, and the company now wants £207,384 back from people it alleges took that business a bit too far.

In its Sept. 17 lawsuit , X accuses Vivek Kumar Sen, Zamyang Sherpa, and unidentified operators of running a coordinated account network that manipulated engagement to collect creator payments.

If £207,000 seems like very little money for a company the size of X, that's because it absolutely is. So why is a company that was bought for $44 billion suing a couple of guys for literally pennies?

The stakes here are the principles behind its (often controversial) payment program and the potential cost of allowing other users to copy the (alleged) behavior. Paying creators gives people a reason to publish, but if manufactured popularity pays too, the company then risks funding the very activity it wants to remove from people's feeds.

The basic arrangement is straightforward: X pays eligible creators for attracting an audience, with views from paying subscribers contributing to earnings. The account essentially gets paid for the attention it gets, more or less regardless of what it or its audience says or does.

That means that someone writing about Bitcoin has a much different set of incentives from someone buying Bitcoin. Buyers just want the price to go up, but posters (for lack of a better word) can get attention anytime they want just by posting content that's bound to enrage or entice their audience.

There's nothing inherently dishonest about that. Newspapers and TV also earn money from audiences through good markets and bad ones. But readers should understand the arrangement, especially when a post feels like friendly advice from someone who shares their enthusiasm.

Short attention spans mean a lengthy announcement or analysis is unlikely to attract hundreds of thousands of views, so users who want a quick, immediate burst of attention resort to publishing clickbait-y headlines. Then, publishing versions or sometimes even word-for-word copies of that headline through multiple accounts gives the same material a better chance of finding an audience.