The owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, has made a new decision: to cut the sharing of advertising revenue from publications containing false information. In reality, the system is more pernicious than it seems, and could well affect honest accounts.
New day, new decision: this is what Elon Musk’s management routine for X (formerly Twitter), his social network, which he bought a year ago, seems to look like. This time, the decision seems entirely laudable: to prevent those who broadcast fake news to benefit from sharing the platform’s advertising revenue.
No money for liars on Twitter
It’s in a publication on that Elon Musk announced the news: “ all posts corrected by Community Notes become ineligible for revenue sharing “. According to him, ” the idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy rather than sensationalism. » And it makes sense: we have known for a long time that false information circulates more virally and quickly than true information.
Enough to avoid encouraging fraudulent accounts to try to make money by deliberately disseminating false information. Indeed, with a Premium+ subscription (also known as Twitter Blue), users can claim a share of the advertising revenue generated by Twitter.
In place since the beginning of the year, this system pays creators based on the number of their impressions. Additional criteria are required: having at least 500 subscribers and generating at least 5 million impressions over the last three months on all of your publications.
The problem is that this blocking concerns publications and not accounts. However, not all tweets from an account are necessarily true or completely false. Some may mix the two: if they don’t make money on fake news, they can gain visibility to push truthful tweets, and thus earn money. While this decision may discourage them, it may not be completely the case.
The problem with Community Notes on X
The other concern that we can see in this decision is the use of Community Notes, or Community Notes in French. Integrated since 2021 on X, but arriving in France this summer, they allow Internet users to add context to a publication, in order to denounce false information. This community tool is not without limits, far from it. An investigation of World last June explained how they appear on the social network.
They are added by Internet users and to register for this program, you must be active on X for at least six months, not have been sanctioned during the previous six months and have a valid telephone number. Each user of the program can submit Community Notes below a tweet. Then, the other members vote on whether it is useful or not.
The problem is that some of the Community Notes are… wrong. Last August, journalist Marion Mariani told France Inter the case of a Community Notes about Peta, arguing that the association killed animals, relying on… a disinformation site.
Community Notes can thus represent a tool of disinformation, or even harassment. Certain personalities, particularly politicians, almost systematically see their publications with Community Notes, sometimes unfounded. And Elon Musk’s decision could well affect creators suffering from cyberharassment, and their haters would in this way have a way of cutting off certain income from X.
For Elon Musk, all “ attempt to militate » with Community Notes cannot exist, since “ All code and data are open source. »