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X To Remove Monetization For Posts Flagged With Community Notes

Musk: 'The Idea Is To Maximize The Incentive For Accuracy Over Sensationalism'

Published: October 30, 2023
  |   By Christopher Bertman

Tech mogul and X owner Elon Musk announced a policy change to the platform’s creator monetization program.

Posts which receive a community note, X’s community-based program which rates the accuracy of information presented in posts, will no longer be eligible for monetization under the platform’s revenue sharing program with creators.

Musk promoted the announcement as a “slight change to creator monetization.”

“Any posts that are corrected by community notes become ineligible for revenue share,” he wrote in a Sunday X post. “The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.”

In a follow-up post, Musk clarified “attempts to weaponize community notes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious.”

“All code and data is open source,” he said.

Another X user suggested giving ad revenue for the post in question to the user who wrote the community note.

Earlier this year, X users were made eligible to receive revenue from the platform for ads placed on their content.

To receive ad revenue from X, users must be subscribed to X Premium or be a Verified Organization through the platform. The user’s account must also have at least 500 followers and garner at least 5 million organic impressions on cumulative posts within the last three months.

Some critics, including Anthony Cabassa, an independent journalist and host of Informed with Anthony on YouTube, have suggested X’s creator monetization program incentivizes sensationalized posts through “impression farming.”

“I’ve begun using X less and less after it became an impression farming platform full of blue checks just ‘breaking news’ anything regardless if true or not,” he wrote in an Oct. 22 post. “I’m all for free speech but accounts purposefully putting out fake news should have consequences, not be rewarded monetarily.”

Cabassa praised Musk’s Sunday announcement in an X post.

“This is an amazing fix!” Cabassa said. “No more impression farming with purposeful propaganda and fake videos/news.”

Musk purchased X, then Twitter, in October 2022 for $44 billion. The tech mogul has made a series of changes to the social media platform including a rebrand from Twitter to X over the summer.

Shortly after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the platform’s blue-check verification badge was overhauled allowing users to receive a verification badge upon their subscription to Twitter Blue, later rebranded as X Premium. Prior to Musk’s change to user verification, users appeared to be verified based on employment or public influence.

X recently announced two new premium tiers including a Premium+ which allows users to experience the platform ad-free.

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