Elon Musk has paused changes to X’s creator revenue sharing program after backlash

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Late Tuesday, X’s head of product, Nikita Beer, announced that starting Thursday, the platform will change its policy around payments and will focus more on impressions from the sticker area. His reasoning was that the platform should discourage manipulation of the algorithm by posting about the United States or Japan to attract the attention of those larger audiences.

“We will give 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,” Pierre wrote on X.

“While we value everyone’s opinions on US politics, we hope this will discourage interest manipulation from US or Japanese accounts and instead stimulate diverse conversations on the platform. We call on creators to start building a local audience. The X community will be richer when there are posts relevant to people all over the world.”

This attracted a lot of criticism from users around the world who said that they posted different topics in different languages, such as English, in an attempt to attract more readers, since the usage of X in their country of origin was rather small.

Hours after the announcement, Elon Musk, in a response to a user, said the company would “temporarily stop moving forward with this until further study,” effectively stopping the changes from moving forward.

Over time, X has changed the way account information is displayed to prevent people from posting false information. Last November, the company introduced a new field in the profile information section to let people know what country or region an account is in. The idea behind this was to understand whether the account was real or a bad actor seeking to spread misinformation – especially political misinformation.

The new creator payout feature appears to have similar roots, where accounts can post about issues in a particular region to attract attention. However, in its current state, the move could have also affected people who post about sports, fashion, movies or technology around the world, not just political accounts.

Earlier this year, The company said it will use its AI tools and community feedback to get rid of such stickers. Last month, Wired magazine reported that