The Announcement
Elon Musk stated on October 30, that X posts that are updated via Community Notes, the platform's user-driven fact-checking tool, will no longer be "eligible for revenue share."
According to what he wrote, "the goal is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism."
Because all of the programming and data is open source, the billionaire executive added, any attempt to "weaponize Community Notes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious.”
Signing up to contribute to Community Notes is open to everybody. Contribution is adding a brief contextual note to any post by pointing out a significant omission or fixing a mistake. Subsequently, people with "different points of view" can evaluate how helpful the note or any other recommended notes are. It is the notes that rise to the top that receive the greatest consensus.
Agenda behind the Announcement
As X struggles to keep up with the flood of false information surrounding the Israel-Hamas conflict, demonetizing users whose postings have been corrected is the latest in a series of steps to establish greater accuracy on the platform.
Through Community Notes, X published a number of improvements in mid-October with the goal of increasing accuracy. A more extensive feature that notifies users whose activity has been subjected to a fact-check could incentivize people who disseminate false information to take down or edit their posts to add more context. Similarly, an update that speeds up the rating process for fact-checks could enable valuable and accurate notes to be published more quickly.
Probable Outcome of the Announcement
The announcement may slow the spread of sensationalist content that is distributed by creators, who stand to gain financially from participating in the reaction economy. However, this action, like the other recent changes, may also be viewed as merely a band-aid solution that won't be able to stop the spread of false information while the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Russia-Ukraine war, and several other crises play out.
After all, if anyone can register and contribute to the Community Notes, we should never forget that there is a huge community of “disinformation spreaders”. What if they too join as evaluators and start manipulating the genuine contents?
Certain Uncertainties!
The amount of users that participate in the platform's creative economy has not been disclosed by X, although it is contingent upon the quantity of X Premium subscribers that utilize the service. As per the data provided by Travis Brown, who has been monitoring suspensions and unsuspensions of customers, the number of X Premium subscribers as of August was less than 950,000. X boasts more than 500 million active monthly users overall. Thus, less than 1% of all users are X Premium users. As creators are required to be Premium members, their share would probably be significantly lower.
The impartiality of the users on Community Notes is another unknown. There are currently over 100,000 members in 44 countries, according to a post made by X CEO Linda Yaccarino in October. The group claims to be diverse, but the organization has not disclosed the demographics of people who have signed up.
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