Elon Musk Ends Financial Support for X Fact-Checking

Elon Musk has announced that X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, will no longer pay for corrections to posts, as the platform faces increasing backlash for spreading misinformation. Since Musk took over the platform a year ago, he has significantly reduced content moderation, reinstated accounts of previously banned extremists, and introduced the option for users to buy account verification, enabling them to benefit from viral posts that are frequently misleading.

Instead, Musk has touted Community Notes, where X users moderate the platform, as a tool to combat misinformation.

But on Sunday, Musk tweeted a change to how Community Notes works.

“Making a slight change to creator monetization: All posts edited by @CommunityNotes are not eligible for revenue sharing,” he wrote.

“The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy rather than sensationalism,” he added.

X pays content producers whose work generates a lot of views a share of advertising revenue.

Musk warned against using patches to make X users ineligible to receive payments.

“Worth noting that any attempt to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people is immediately apparent as all code and data is open source,” he wrote.

Musk’s announcement follows a $16-a-month subscription plan announced Friday that says users who pay more will get the biggest boost in their responses. Earlier this year, it announced an $8-a-month plan to get a “verified” account.

A recent investigation by the disinformation monitoring group NewsGuard found that verified, paying subscribers were major distributors of misinformation between Israel and Hamas.

“Nearly three-quarters of X’s most viral posts spreading misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war are pushed by ‘verified’ X accounts,” the group said.

According to it, the 250 most engaging posts promoting one of 10 prominent false or unsubstantiated war narratives were viewed more than 100 million times worldwide in just one week.

NewsGuard said 186 of those posts were from verified accounts and only 79 had been verified using community notes.

The verified accounts “proved a boon to false actors sharing false information,” said NewsGuard.

“For less than a movie ticket, they have gained the added credibility associated with the once-prestigious blue tick and enabled them to reach a larger audience on the platform,” it said.

While the organization said it found misinformation spreading widely on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Telegram, it added that it found that false narratives about the war between Israel and Hamas tend to spread on X before spreading elsewhere.