Demonetization
Twitter is overflowing with Israel fake news – with this measure Musk wants to finally counteract it
Under Elon Musk, the service X, formerly known as Twitter, has changed dramatically
© Alain Jocard / AFP
The Hamas attack on Israel drew attention to the truth problem on the short message service Twitter/X like no other news situation before. With a new measure, owner Elon Musk now wants to at least reduce his own share of the problem.
It was a wave of disinformation that has rarely been seen before, even on crisis-tested social media. Almost with the beginning of the Hamas attack on Israel began on the short message service X, better than Twitter is also known for a flood of false reports, speculation and outright lies about both sides of the conflict. Some of the changes made by owner Elon Musk further fueled the problem. Now he wants to defuse one of them.
There will be a change to the program initiated by Musk that allows X users to earn money from their content, Musk announced last night. “Any post that is corrected with a community note is automatically excluded from revenue distribution,” he explains.
Homemade problem
Musk is indirectly admitting a problem that he himself created. Since he took over Twitter a year ago and subsequently renamed it X, his decisions have directly changed both the verification of content and the incentive for new contributions. In combination, the two changes in current reporting led to an increase in sensationalist misinformation.
Both are related to the way X verifies users and information. While Twitter had previously manually confirmed accounts as real and had internal teams check posted information, Musk threw both of these out the window. The verification of content is carried out by volunteers, who cannot delete posts, but can only add comments, the so-called community notes. Instead of going through a test, you can now book the familiar blue tick as a subscription. In addition, these subscribers have the option of receiving a share of X’s advertising revenue for particularly successful content.
Together, this offered a dangerous incentive: if you wanted to make money with the subscription, you had to increase the number of views and interactions with your posts. At the same time, there have so far been no negative consequences for posting false information. Even proven false claims could keep the cash register ringing – as long as other users saw them or argued about them. Quickly posting controversial content became much more attractive than researching the facts. The problem of disinformation, which was already rampant on social media, was further fueled.
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New incentives
The new measure is now intended to defuse the explosive combination. “The goal is to increase the incentives for accuracy rather than for sensationalism,” Musk indirectly admits the consequences of the implementation so far. However, it remains to be seen whether this will work in practice. An investigation by “NBC” three weeks ago showed that even with known false reports, only a fraction of the corresponding posts had community notes. Even reports with hundreds of thousands of views remained uncorrected.
This is certainly due to the way the notes work. It is not enough for one of the users who voluntarily participate in the program to write a comment. In order for this to be visible to others, an unknown number of other participants must also approve of this change. If the posts are not examined by enough volunteers, they will remain without comment. And are therefore still entitled to pay out the advertising shares.
Different rules for the boss
Musk seems to fear a different impact with his measure anyway. “Attempts to use demonetization as a weapon will be immediately apparent,” he reassured subscribers worried about their earnings in an additional note, as if that were the biggest concern with the new feature.
However, his own handling of the community notes is completely different. When he posted a graphic over the weekend that purported to show U.S. military bases around Iran, it was quickly noted that several of the bases don’t even exist. “I love being annotated,” Musk claimed in another comment. “It shows that no one here is safe from being corrected.” However, it would be an obvious “joke meme”. And apparently different rules apply to Musk: The comment has now disappeared again.
Sources:Elon Musk, The Guardian, NBC