Elon Musk Promises to Stop Paying People to Post Misinformation on Twitter

What a trainwreck.

Red Flagged

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been flooded with misinformation and outright lies ever since Elon Musk took over the app last year — but its Community Notes, which allows people to provide context or corrections to a post, offered at least a glimmer of hope in light of Musk's notorious mismanagement.

But now, in news that may help or hinder X's bonkers disinformation environment, Musk announced in a tweet that "any posts that are corrected by Community Notes become ineligible for revenue share."

"The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism," he added.

In addition, Musk wrote in a follow-up tweet that anybody who misuses Community Notes in order "to demonetize people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source."

In many ways, it's arguably too little too late, given the tsunami of misinformation spreading largely unfettered on the platform. Even user-submitted fact checks in the form of Community Notes, as critics have found, often fall short of meaningfully addressing the issue on a broader scale.

False Prophets

Will this deter anybody from spreading misinformation and outright lies on the platform? Who knows, but it may, at least in the short term, ding accounts who are part of Musk's controversial creator monetization, revenue sharing program, which saw a number of notorious accounts known to post salacious, often inflammatory, and misleading content on X, get considerable sums of money for their tweets.

And what's the level of Musk's sincerity in combating sensationalism when he is often a purveyor and promoter of falsehoods and doctored content himself? That's not to mention the repeated layoffs affecting the platform's content moderation efforts.

It's akin to having the fox guard the hen house — we have our doubts about Musk's ability to meaningfully address the issue by demonetizing posts, especially given his own track record.

As always, the proof will be in the pudding, so to speak.

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