Elon Musk pauses changes to X’s creator revenue-sharing program after backlash

Social media platform X swiftly backtracked on its announcement regarding new rules for creator monetization, which had focused on payouts based on engagement from a creator’s local audience.

Late Tuesday, X Head of Product Nikita Bier announced that, starting Thursday, the platform will change its policy around payouts and will give more emphasis to impressions from the poster’s region. His rationale was that the platform should disincentivize gaming the algorithm by posting about the U.S. or Japan to gain the attention of those larger audiences.

“We will be giving more weight to impressions from your home region—to encourage content that resonates with people in your country, in neighboring countries and people who speak your language,” Bier wrote on X.

“While we appreciate everyone’s opinion on American politics, we hope this will disincentivize gaming the attention of US or Japanese accounts and instead, drive diverse conversations on the platform. We invite creators to start building an audience locally. X will be a much richer community when there are relevant posts for people in all parts of the world.”

This drew a lot of criticism from users worldwide who said they posted about various topics in different languages, like English, in an effort to attract more readership, given that their home country’s X usage was fairly small.

Hours after the announcement, in a reply to a user, Elon Musk said that the company will “pause moving forward with this until further consideration,” effectively stopping the changes from moving forward.

Over time, X has changed the way account information is displayed to stop people from spreading misinformation. Last November, the company introduced a new field in the profile information section to let people know about the country or the region an account is based out of. The idea behind this was to understand if the account is authentic or a bad actor looking to spread misinformation — particularly political misinformation.

The new creator payout feature seemingly has similar roots, as accounts could be posting about a specific region’s issues to gain attention. However, in its current state, the move would have also impacted people who post about sports, fashion, movies, or tech worldwide, and not just political accounts.

Earlier this year, X changed its rules to include a clause that would bar accounts from creator payouts for 90 days if they use AI to post misleading content about war without any disclosures. The company said it would use its own AI tools and community notes to weed out such posters. Last month, Wired reported that X was a ripe ground of misinformation after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran with posts of AI-generated videos and passing off video game clips as actual war footage.