Elon Musk announces demonetisation of corrected posts on community notes

Elon Musk’s attempt to fight misinformation: Elon Musk announced on Sunday that posts corrected by Community Notes, the platform's crowd-sourced fact-checking system, will no longer be eligible for revenue sharing. According to him, this is aimed towards prioritising accuracy over sensationalism. He also underlined the attempts to misuse Community Notes to demonetise individuals would be easily detectable since all code and data are open source.

Community Notes allows anyone to contribute by adding context to a post, pointing out important omissions, or correcting errors. Users from various perspectives can rate the helpfulness of these notes, and the most widely accepted notes rise to the top.

Combating misinformation

This move to demonetise posts that have been corrected is part of a broader effort to combat misinformation on the platform, particularly in the context of events like the Israel-Hamas conflict. In mid-October, X introduced updates to enhance accuracy through Community Notes, including faster fact-check ratings and notifications for those whose content has been fact-checked.

While this step aims to reduce the spread of sensationalist information, its effectiveness, along with other recent updates, remains uncertain in the face of ongoing global crises such as the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war. 

X has not disclosed the number of users in its creator economy, but it is limited by the number of X Premium subscribers. As of August, there were fewer than 950,000 X Premium subscribers, accounting for less than 1 per cent of the platform's over 500 million monthly active users. 

The diversity of Community Notes contributors is emphasised, although specific demographics have not been released. Currently, there are over 100,000 contributors from 44 countries, according to X CEO Linda Yaccarino's October update.