Verified Twitter users are the ones who spread the most misinformation online. That’s what the most recent reports studying the topic claim. That’s why Elon Musk wants to put an end to them on his social network in the most efficient way: by not paying.
Elon Musk has announced that the platform is disabling revenue sharing on posts corrected by fact-checks from Community Notes.
The aim is to make spreading incendiary false information on Twitter/X unprofitable. Remember that during the Israel-Hamas conflict, many Twitter users took advantage of lies and manipulation to make money.
If you lie, the money is over
“Any post that is fact-checked by @CommunityNotes ceases to be eligible for revenue sharing,” Musk wrote on his official account on Sunday. “The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism,” explained the CEO.
Implemented earlier this year, Twitter/X’s advertising revenue-sharing program gives users a portion of the revenue from ads displayed in responses to their messages.
The program is only available to users with a X Premium or Verified Organization paid account, and they must also have at least 500 followers, as well as a minimum of 5 million organic impressions in total across all their posts in the last three months.
Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that social media posts are more likely to go viral if they are false, controversial, polarizing, negative, or include misinformation.
Therefore, if you wanted to maximize your potential advertising revenue on Twitter/X before today, you were incentivized to publish this type of content.
The fact that certain posts cannot receive advertising revenue will not prevent verified accounts from spreading misinformation, but they will have one less reason to do so.
It is unclear whether this data transparency will actually prevent people from strategically applying Community Notes to demonetize accounts, or if it will simply be evident when they do.
