Twitter/X owner and executioner Elon Musk has announced that the platform is disabling ad revenue sharing on posts which are corrected by Community Notes fact checks. The aim is to make sharing incendiary false information on Twitter/X less obviously and immediately profitable.
"Any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes become ineligible for revenue share," Musk wrote on his official account on Sunday. "The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism."
Implemented earlier this year, Twitter/X's ad revenue sharing program gives users a cut of the income from ads shown in the replies to their posts. The program is only available to users with a paid X Premium or Verified Organization 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 within the last three months.
Unfortunately, it's widely believed that social media posts are more likely to go viral if they are divisive, polarising, negative, or include misinformation. So if you were aiming to maximise your potential Twitter/X ad revenue earnings prior to today, you were essentially incentivised to make posts which included such content.
Having specific posts ineligible for ad revenue still won't stop verified accounts from continuing to peddle misinformation, but at least they'll have one less reason to do so.
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Musk also attempted to address the possibility of people abusing Twitter/X's new policy by using Community Notes' crowd-sourced content moderation with the intent to restrict an account's potential ad revenue.
"Worth 'noting' that any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source," Musk claimed.
It's unclear exactly whether such data transparency will actually prevent people from applying Community Notes to strategically demonetise accounts, or whether it will simply be apparent when they do.
Interestingly, Musk did not mention any intention to disable ads on posts that have been corrected by Community Notes, making this new policy seem like a win-win for Twitter/X. While the company will no longer explicitly reward users who spread mis- or disinformation, it will presumably still reap the ad revenue rewards of such posts for itself.
