In a move aimed at curbing the profitability of incendiary false information on Twitter/X, owner, and influencer Elon Musk has revealed a significant policy change. The platform will now disable ad revenue sharing on posts that have been corrected by Community Notes fact checks.
Elon Musk took to his official Twitter account on Sunday to explain the new policy, stating, “Any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes become ineligible for revenue share. The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.”
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2023
Introduced earlier this year, Twitter/X’s ad revenue sharing program offers users a portion of the income generated from ads displayed in response to their posts. This program is exclusively available to users with a paid X Premium or Verified Organization account, provided they have at least 500 followers and a minimum of 5 million organic impressions across all their posts in the past three months.
The incentive to maximize ad revenue earnings had, unfortunately, led to a trend where divisive, polarizing, negative, or misinformation-laden content was more likely to go viral. With the recent policy change, specific posts are now disqualified from ad revenue sharing, effectively discouraging such content.
While this update won’t entirely prevent verified accounts from spreading misinformation, it does eliminate one incentive to do so. Elon Musk also addressed concerns about potential abuse of the policy by users attempting to restrict an account’s ad revenue through Community Notes’ crowd-sourced content moderation. He reassured users by stating, “Worth ‘noting’ that any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious because all code and data are open source.”
This step represents a significant shift towards promoting accuracy and responsible content sharing on Twitter/X. Stay tuned for more updates on this evolving policy.
