Elon Musk says X posts with misinformation are now ‘ineligible for revenue share’

Musk says change aims to ‘maximise incentive for accuracy over sensationalism’

Posts on X carrying any misinformation that is corrected by the platform’s crowd-sourced fact-checking system will now be “ineligible for revenue share”, the social media company’s owner Elon Musk has said.

“Any posts that are corrected by Community Notes become ineligible for revenue share,” the multibillionaire posted on X on Sunday.

Mr Musk said the change aims to “maximise the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism”.

The Tesla titan also noted that any attempts to “weaponise Community Notes to demonetise people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source.”

Some users were quick to criticise the change, observing that the feature is used not just to correct misinformation, but also to add essential context even if there is nothing wrong with the initial post.

The Community Notes feature was first launched by Twitter co-founder and former chief Jack Dorsey in 2021 as a way to debunk misleading tweets.

Currently, eligible users on the social media platform can sign up to contribute to Community Notes, which involves sharing a short note of context for any post, including correcting an error or providing essential information that has been omitted.

An account can sign up for Community Notes, according to X, if the user has not recently violated the platform’s rules and has been on the platform for at least 6 months.

Other users who view the note can then rate the helpfulness of notes with the note garnering the largest consensus surfacing to the top.

Then earlier this year, Twitter/X started paying creators on the platform for the first time via a revenue-sharing program that provided them compensation for the ads appearing in their reply threads.

But the social media platform has come under increasing scrutiny for its handling of misinformation since Mr Musk bought Twitter for $44bn last year and cut nearly two-thirds of the company’s workforce.

The platform’s handling of misinformation has particularly been on focus following the conflict in Israel and Gaza.

The European Union also raised concerns that amid the conflict Twitter was not quick to take down problematic content even when it had been flagged by relevant authorities.

EU commissioner Thierry Breton noted that Twitter was hosting “fake and manipulated images and facts ... such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games”.

The EU has also opened an investigation into X on the issue, while the company maintained that it has removed hundreds of Hamas-linked accounts in response to the concerns.