Elon Musk 'pauses' plan to stop paying foreign accounts on X for US political commentary

As concerns grow regarding foreign influence in American politics, X Head of Product Nikita Bier announced on Tuesday that the revenue-sharing program will be making payments based on engagement in a user's "home region." As soon as it was announced, Elon Musk put the program on "pause."

There are countless accounts on X based in foreign nations that spend most of their time commenting on American politics and culture. Additional foreign accounts comment on fringe US pundits, driving up their revenue stream even though that stream is not coming from American engagement. This gives that content an outsized appearance on X.

"Starting Thursday," Bier said, "we'll be updating our revenue sharing incentives to better reward the content we want on X: 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.

"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's relevant posts for people in all parts of the world."

Many Americans advocated for the proposed policy as US commentators compete for influence with foreign actors for attention to commentary on policy that affects America. Foreign accounts with millions of followers routinely weigh in on American affairs, and these accounts will likely be affected.

Another impact of the policy would be that engagement pushed by foreign bots to American accounts will no longer generate revenue sharing for those American accounts. This comes as welcome news to many US pundits who are sick of seeing misleading engagement figures for accounts that generate and perpetrate false narratives.

However, after Bier posted the planned policy change, some foreign users complained, saying that their audiences are American, that they post in English, and that they don't want their revenue stream to be affected. Account @dvorahfr, posting from France, saying "Those who cause trouble may be punished, but with this change, which will significantly reduce our earnings, you're also penalizing a number of accounts that use the international language without any ill intent.

"X tells us that videos and new, high-quality content will be prioritized, but this change will, on the contrary, drastically reduce our earnings. Is there any way to reverse this decision, please?"

X owner Elon Musk replied directly to her, saying, "We will pause moving forward with this until further consideration." 

@dvorahfr thanked Musk for the adjustment, but American accounts indicated their disappointment with the delay in enacting the new plan. Others suggested that the entire revenue-sharing program, which incentivizes outrage and sensationalism, be scrapped entirely. Others suggested that users should be able to select countries from which they want to see content and block content from countries in which they have no interest.