Elon Musk: Fact-Checked Tweets May Be Ineligible for Payouts
Elon Musk is trying to stop users from posting viral misinformation on Twitter/X by clamping down on its revenue-sharing program.
For months now, Twitter/X has been rewarding users for viral tweets with real cash — even if those tweets contained misleading claims or blatantly wrong information. But on Sunday, Musk said his company would try to end the practice.
To do so, Twitter/X will lean on Community Notes, a crowdsourcing way to fact-check tweets. “Any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes become ineligible for revenue share,” Musk said. “The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.”
The company’s revenue-sharing program, which debuted in July, has been spotted sending five-figure payouts to top influencers, which may have prompted others to post attention-grabbing tweets in order to make money. Last week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the company has already paid over $20 million to creators.
But the same system has come under criticism for giving users financial incentive to post misleading, divisive, or factually wrong tweets. A recent study found that much of the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Twitter/X came from verified accounts, which are eligible for the revenue-sharing program.
It looks like Musk agrees there’s a problem. But the big question is whether Twitter’s Community Notes feature will be able to rein in the misinformation. Community Notes is volunteer driven and has faced its own fair share of criticism over how it can be exploited to spread misinformation or suffer from in-fighting over which fact-checks should be elevated to the top.
In response, Twitter/X says it recently improved the company's algorithms to make Community Notes “more sensitive to
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