Elon Musk is once again changing the rules of the game. The businessman, who bought X/Twitter a year agohas just announced its desire to demonetize misleading information on its platform… or at least part of it.
Under pressure from the European Union, Elon Musk decided to act. In an announcement made on X on October 29, the owner of the microblogging platform announced a new change on the platform. From now on, content that inherits a “community rating” will not be eligible for the platform’s remuneration program. “The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy rather than sensationalism», Explains the boss of the company.
X seeks to stifle fake news
As a reminder, community notes (or “Community Notes” in the original version) are inserts added to certain tweets considered misleading or incomplete. The latter are supposed to provide more context or contradictory sources in order to prevent false information from circulating unhindered on the platform. The authors of these notes are volunteers hand-picked to participate in the program. Since its establishment a year ago, numerous notes have appeared on the platform, sometimes even under the declarations of certain political figures or large media groups.
Elon Musk’s idea is now to prevent the monetization of content that will be marked with one of these notes. This obviously only concerns people registered with the platform’s revenue sharing program, i.e. a handful of accounts chosen directly by the platform according to fairly opaque selection criteria. To summarize, if an account registered in the program shares misleading information corrected by a community rating, then the latter will not be able to earn any income from it.
A response from Musk to the EU
It is difficult to see this change as anything other than a reaction to the recent attacks carried out by the European Union. Accused of not sufficiently moderating content in the eyes of the DSA, the company has rightly highlighted its community notes as a valid solution in the fight against disinformation. Cutting off the income of those who share erroneous information should, Musk hopes, reduce the flow of sensationalist tweets and calm the ardor of Thierry Breton and Brussels.
The site is all the more observed since a recent NewsGuard report explained that certified accounts (a sine qua non condition for joining the revenue sharing program) shared “74% of the most viral false or baseless claims related to the Israel-Hamas war“. Unfortunately, in this ocean of fake news spread by blue checkmarks, only 32% of the most viral posts were accompanied by a note from the community supposed to correct the situation.
We will therefore see if the threat of demonetization will be enough to calm the “super-spreaders» fake news, or if community notes will be used as a weapon to limit the reach of certain accounts, as is already the case in the French political sphere, BFM noted recently.
Source : Elon Musk — X/Twitter, BFM
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