Users on X who spread information that’s later corrected by Community Notes, the crowdsourced program of fact-checkers, won’t be paid for engagement on those tweets, according to an announcement Sunday by owner Elon Musk. The change comes after independent researchers have warned that X has become a central hub for misinformation and extremism since Musk bought the site one year ago.
“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 on Sunday afternoon.
X has always struggled with misinformation and disinformation, long before Musk took over control of the site. But Musk’s changes to the social media platform have accelerated the spread of bad information because they set up financial incentives for people to spread sensationalistic and just plain wrong info.
Musk launched a program earlier this year to pay creators on the site based on the number of views their posts get, which cause many users to start posting outrageous and sometimes violent photos and videos. The problem has only gotten worse since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, which began after Hamas militants conducted coordinated terror attacks in Israel that killed over 1,400 people.
One right-wing influencer, Jackson Hinkle, has over 1.7 million followers on X and has been spreading countless lies in recent days. As one example from Saturday, Hinkle tweeted that Israeli news outlet Haaretz had reported things like, “Number of people Hamas shot less than 100, most were settlers with guns on them.” That, among the other things Hinkle tweeted, simply isn’t true and Haaretz tweeted as much.
“This post contains blatant lies about the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. It has absolutely no basis in Haaretz’s reporting, then or since,” Haaretz tweeted about one of Hinkle’s very long tweets.
But, as to be expected, Haaretz’s tweets trying to correct the misinformation have been viewed by just 1 million people, while Hinkle’s tweets have been seen by over 4.6 million people at the time of this writing. Other tweets by Hinkle have also been refuted, and while he may have been financially rewarded under Musk’s new program in the past, once they received a note from the Community Notes fact-checkers, he’ll no longer be paid for engagement on those tweets.
One question that hasn’t been answered about Musk’s changes to the creator revenue sharing program is whether Community Notes with merely contextual information will still be ineligible for monetization. Sometimes the community of fact-checkers ad a note not because the information is wrong, but because more information would be helpful to know.
I asked X for more information on Sunday but didn’t immediately hear back. I’ll update this post if anyone from X reponds.
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