Elon Musk says creators spreading lies won’t get paid for tweets

Elon Musk has brought a new change to creator monetization. In a post on the X platform, he said that if a user’s tweet is corrected by Community Notes, the crowdsourced program of fact-checkers, then that person will not be paid for engagement on those tweets.

The announcement by Musk has come after independent researchers have warned that X has become a central hub for misinformation and extremism since Musk took over the platform in October 2022.

“Making a slight change to creator monetization: Any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes become ineligible for revenue share. The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism,” Musk tweeted.

Also read: Israel and Gaza conflict: Elon Musk offers Starlink to help restore internet

Worth “noting” that any attempts to weaponize Community Notes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source, Musk added.

Twitter has always struggled with combating misinformation about major news events but was still the go-to place to find out what’s happening in the world.

However, the Israel-Hamas war has underscored how the platform now transformed into X has become not only unreliable but is actively promoting falsehoods, according to the experts.

Also read: X removes hundreds of Hamas-linked accounts, says, ‘no place for terrorist..’

Recently, experts said that under Elon Musk the platform has deteriorated to the point that it’s not just failing to clamp down on misinformation but is favoring posts by accounts that pay for its blue-check subscription service, regardless of who runs them.

If such posts go viral, their blue-checked creators can be eligible for payments from X, creating a financial incentive to post whatever gets the most reaction — including misinformation.

Ian Bremmer, a prominent foreign policy expert, posted on X that the level of disinformation on the Israel-Hamas war is “being algorithmically promoted” on the platform.

Subsequently, Musk’s X said it scrubbed or labeled tens of thousands of posts including “illegal” content since the Israel-Hamas war erupted.

Hours after Hamas gunmen surged into Israel, unverified photos and videos of air strikes, homes being destroyed and other posts depicting military violence proliferated on social media platforms including X, prompting criticism of their response to the conflict.

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Updated: 30 Oct 2023, 06:42 AM IST