X, formerly Twitter, was set to introduce changes to its revenue sharing incentives that would give more weight to impressions from a user’s home country. However, the move has now been put on hold by X owner Elon Musk after a user pointed out that the change could negatively impact creators’ earnings.
The proposed change was triggered after X rolled out a transparency feature that exposed users’ locations. The feature revealed that several accounts with significant engagement, which were commenting on a country’s politics to influence opinion, were not actually based in that country. For example, accounts commenting heavily on India’s politics were sometimes found to be operating from neighbouring countries such as Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Nikita Bier, the company’s Head of Product, announced the proposed policy change and cited the United States as an example. He said that while X values everyone’s opinion on US politics, the company hoped the new policy would discourage people from trying to game attention from users in specific countries.
“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,” Bier wrote in a post on X.
According to reports from Engadget, the United States and Japan have the largest number of users on X. When the company introduced its location transparency feature last year, several popular accounts posting commentary on US politics were found to be based outside the country. Bier also encouraged creators to focus on building local audiences.
“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,” he wrote.
Users warn policy could hurt global creators
However, the proposed change quickly drew criticism from some users. One X user, who goes by the username dvorahfr, argued that the policy could discourage creators who live outside English-speaking countries but tweet in English to reach a global audience.
The user said the policy could also penalise many accounts that use English as an international language without any ill intent. Responding to the user’s comment, Elon Musk announced that the policy change would be paused for now while the company considers the concerns raised by users.
