X will no longer pay creators for tweets promoting misinformation. Elon Musk said the company is making a “slight change” to its monetization program and that tweets that are fact-checked via community notes will no longer be eligible for payouts as part of X’s revenue-sharing program.

The update appears to be an attempt to remove incentives for high-profile accounts to spread viral misinformation. “The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism,” Musk said. X also recently started to require community notes contributors to cite their sources in fact checks.

The latest change comes as researchers, fact checkers and journalists have raised the alarm about the amount of viral misinformation spreading on X amid the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza. European Union officials have opened an investigation into the company’s handling of misinformation related to the war.

Following Musk’s takeover of Twitter a year ago, the company laid off teams responsible for curating and promoting reputable tweets about breaking news events and removed tools for reporting misinformation in the app. Instead, the company has relied on its crowd-sourced fact checking tool, community notes.

But critics have said that community notes are subject to manipulation and that the user-contributed fact checks are often unable to keep up with the sheer amount of viral falsehoods, particularly those promoted by verified accounts. A recent analysis from NewsGuard, a nonprofit that tracks the spread of misinformation, found that 74 percent of “the most viral posts on X advancing misinformation about the Israel-Hamas War are being pushed by ‘verified’ X accounts.”

As BBC researcher Shayan Sardarizadeh pointed out, the change to make tweets with community notes ineligible for payments has already been criticized by a number of high-profile accounts whose tweets are often “community noted.” Musk added that “any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious,” but didn’t say how the company would deal with attempts at manipulation. X didn’t respond to a request for comment.

X is adding two new tiers to its subscription offering, previously known as Twitter Blue. The company is adding a new, $16 per month “Premium+ tier” that eliminates ads in users’ following and “for you” timelines, in addition to the blue checkmark and other existing perks for subscribers. X is also adding a new, lower-cost “basic” tier that costs $3 a month.

The new subscription plans come as X’s advertising business has continued to decline, and the company is increasingly reliant on subscription revenue. X has also recently begun testing a program that requires all new users in some countries to pay $1 per year in order to post and reply to tweets.

In addition to removing ads from users’ timeline, X said in a tweet that Premium+ subscribers would get an even bigger algorithmic boost in replies compared with subscribers paying for the cheaper premium level. Of note, it appears that both new tiers are only available via the web, at least for now, which is likely meant to help the company avoid additional fees associated with Apple and Google’s app stores.

The $3 basic tier appears to be a much more limited set of features compared with Premium and Premium+ and, notably, doesn’t include the blue checkmark or revenue-sharing. Instead, it offers extras like tweets editing, longer posts, the ability to download videos. It also offers a “small reply boost” and encrypted direct messages.

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Exactly one year has passed since Elon Musk, fresh off a months-long legal battle that forced him to buy the company, strolled into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink.

At the time, we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. But there were no shortage of predictions — including from us at Engadget — about just how messy and chaotic Twitter might become under Musk’s leadership. I’ve spent the last week revisiting many of those stories, and I’ve been struck by how, for a famously erratic CEO, just how predictable many aspects of his takeover have been.

Before the acquisition closed, Musk spent months talking, tweeting and texting about his plans for the platform. Many of those early statements, like promises to relax moderation rules and to create an edit button, have actually happened.

But as is so often the case with Musk, even the most predictable of his decisions have played out in unexpected ways.

Amnesty for Donald Trump and other banned accounts

Of all of Musk’s plans for Twitter, one that drew the most headlines was his intention to restore Donald Trump’s account. (He went as far as calling the original ban a “morally bad decision.”) While Musk’s biographer claims he had some second thoughts about the matter, he opted to reinstate the former president following the result of a poll from his Twitter account.

What many may not have fully anticipated was just how many former offenders Musk was willing to allow back on the platform. Despite his initial promise that Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape,” Musk decided to offer “general amnesty” to more than 12,000 previously-banned accounts, including a number of neo-Nazis.

The slow death of content moderation (and Twitter’s ad business)

It was no secret that Musk wanted to loosen Twitter’s content moderation rules. Before his takeover, he suggested that he was in favor of allowing all speech that was legal. While many pundits predicted advertisers could be wary of Musk’s more permissive approach, it’s hard to overstate just how dire the company’s ad business has become over the last year.

A majority of major advertisers have stopped buying ads on the platform, despite CEO Linda Yaccarino’s rosier (and misleading) suggestions otherwise. Musk himself has admitted ad revenue has dropped at least 50 percent. And The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the banks that financed Musk’s Twitter deal are expecting to lose hundreds of millions of dollars as it’s become nearly impossible for them to offload the debt.

More “transparency”

One area that gave even some Musk critics a little bit of optimism was his insistence, prior to the acquisition, that he would bring a new level of transparency to the platform. He vowed to open-source the company’s recommendation algorithm, and pull back the curtain on the dreaded “shadowban.”

In some respects, he’s followed through. Code for the company’s main recommendation algorithm is on Github. X has also previewed alerts that will notify users when their accounts have been restricted from search and other areas of the service.

But those efforts may also be more shallow than what some had hoped for. Publishing “the algorithm” didn’t actually reveal much about the inner workings of the platform, according to those who have studied it. Users still have very little insight into how posts are prioritized or how accounts not belonging to Elon Musk can expand their reach.

At the same time, Musk has taken a number of steps that have dramatically reduced outsiders’ ability to understand how information spreads on X. Musk dismantled the company’s previously open and accessible APIs in favor of tools that now cost tens of thousands of dollars a month for much more limited insights. Paywalling has had a devastating impact on researchers, the vast majority of whom can no longer afford to access the limited data that is available via X’s API.

“But wait,” I can already hear a few people screaming from the comments, “wHaT aBoUt ThE tWiTteR fiLeS? Surely, that is transparency?”

While Musk’s decision to selectively leak the messages of former employees was unprecedented and potentially illegal, the truth is that the so-called “Twitter Files” didn’t actually reveal all that much about how Twitter operated. And the company’s own lawyers have refuted, in court, that the details within them are proof of any kind of government censorship or overreach.

Moreover, the disclosures themselves weren’t all that… transparent. Partial documents were only provided to a couple of writers — handpicked by Musk — who only published snippets of Slack messages, emails and screenshots from Twitter’s internal tools. The underlying documents have still not been released in their entirety, or provided to other media outlets for dissemination. Even Jack Dorsey said it would have been better, and more transparent, to release everything “Wikileaks style” for all to see, rather than selectively tweeting out bits and pieces.

X and the “everything app”

Shortly before his takeover, Musk tweeted that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” At the time, many people assumed Musk was talking about emulating WeChat, which in China is used for almost all facets of daily life from shopping to messaging to banking.

However, one year later, it’s still not entirely clear what he means or how the service formerly known as Twitter will transform itself into something resembling an “everything app.” There are some signs of change: He and CEO Linda Yaccarino have said they want to add banking and other financial services to X. The platform has also introduced new features like video calling and is planning on adding live shopping.

The WeChat comparison breaks down, however, when you consider that, while WeChat is unquestionably the most dominant app in China, Twitter is, at best, the sixth-most popular social media app in the US. And the app’s usage has been sharply declining for the last year. There may be room to expand the types of features offered on X, but it’s not clear they’ll result in a significant boost in popularity or engagement.

The existential threats to Twitter

If you had told me a year ago that Musk’s decisions would be so unpopular it would lead to a mass exodus from the platform, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Threatening to rage-quit Twitter over even the most minor of changes is a time honored tradition.

But if you had told me that in less than a year, there would be a surge in upstart alternatives that are starting to feel like viable challengers, I would have been less credulous. And if you had told me that, a year later, the strongest-looking challenger was a fediverse-compatible platform created by Meta, I definitely wouldn’t have believed it.

But, with a year of hindsight, it strikes me that perhaps the most significant part of Musk’s legacy so far is not what he’s done to the service previously known as Twitter, but the wave of new platforms inspired by his actions.

Bluesky, previously a backwater Twitter offshoot, has surged to a million users, despite still being an invitation-only network. Mastodon and the fediverse, both of which predate Musk’s takeover, are more popular than ever. And Meta, which has a previously dismal track record at building its own apps (not called Facebook) that people like, has managed to make Threads into a viable (if flawed) alternative.

None of these are perfect replacements for what old Twitter was, at its best. And they may not be able to sustain their momentum for years to come, but Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter has ushered in what many believe to be a new era of social media. It feels increasingly possible that we may look back at the end of Twitter and the rise of X as a boon for a better version of social media.

Meta’s increasingly aggressive push to promote Threads seems to be paying off. Mark Zuckerberg said the app currently has “just under” 100 million monthly active users, and that he thinks there’s a “good chance” the app could reach 1 billion users in the next couple of years.

“I thought for a long time, there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive and I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

Threads’ growth has been closely watched since its July launch. The app saw 100 million sign-ups in its first week, but quickly saw engagement drop off amid complaints about limited functionality and feeds flooded with posts from brands. But Meta has steadily added new features, and engagement seems to have rebounded in recent weeks as Elon Musk makes unpopular changes to X, like stripping headlines from links. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Threads has recently succeeded in attracting former “power users” from X.

Threads’ growth wasn’t the only bright spot for Meta, which reported just over $34 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 23 percent increase from last year. There are no 3.9 billion people who use one of the company’s each month, a new high for the social media company. During a call with analysts, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s recent focus on “efficiency,” which resulted in the company shedding more than 20,000 jobs over the last year, has been an effective strategy that will continue as the company faces “a very volatile world.”

Zuckerberg also shared that Meta would be increasingly focused on generative AI going forward. “We're going to continue deprioritizing a number of non-AI projects across the company to shift people towards working on AI instead,” Zuckerberg said.

Those AI investments, however, won’t come at the expense of new spending on the metaverse. Reality Labs, Meta’s division overseeing its AR and VR spending, continued its multibillion-dollar losing streak. Revenue from Reality Labs sank to just $210 million, with losses climbing to $3.7 billion for the quarter and more than $11 billion since the start of 2023. Meta CFO Susan Li said the losses were expected to accelerate further in the coming year due to “ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”

Zuckerberg, who has recently attempted to highlight AI advancements within AR and VR, said that the technology has the potential to reshape all of the company’s services. “Generative AI is going to transform meaningfully how people use each of the different apps that we build,” he said.

Snapchat grew to more than 400 million users, Snap announced in its third-quarter earnings report. The app added nine million new users in the last quarter, bringing its total daily active users (DAUs) to 406 million, an increase of 12 percent from last year, the company said.

The milestone comes a little more than a year after Snap laid off about 20 percent of its workforce in an effort to cut costs as advertising revenue slowed. Those cuts, along with new product features, are apparently starting to pay off.

The company reported $1.19 billion in revenue for the quarter, an increase of 5 percent from last year and better than Wall Street analysts expected, according to CNBC. In a statement, Snap pointed to its subscription service, Snapchat+, as a key part of its strategy to grow its non-advertising sources of revenue. Snap announced last month that Snapchat+, which offers users exclusive and experimental features for $4 a month, had reached five million subscribers.

Generative AI has also been a bright spot for the company. The company’s MyAI chatbot, which rolled out to all Snapchat users in April, has reached more than 200 million people who have collectively exchanged more than 20 billion messages with the OpenAI-powered chatbot. Snap said it believes the assistant is one of the “most used AI chatbots available today.”

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Meta is facing a massive class-action lawsuit from 41 states as well as the District of Columbia over alleged harms to its young users. Attorneys general from dozens of states joined a lawsuit, filed in California federal court, claiming that Meta knew its “addictive” features were harmful and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platform.

In addition to the California suit, attorneys general from eight other states filed their own claims against the company. In a statement, California Attorney General Rob Bonta described the filings as part of a “coordinated effort” to hold Meta accountable for alleged misconduct. “Our bipartisan investigation has arrived at a solemn conclusion: Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits,” Bonta said.

The lawsuit is the latest reckoning over the company’s handling of youth safety and mental health. Lawmakers, regulators and other officials have become increasingly focused on the issue, and whether social media companies are doing enough to protect their youngest users.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, to The Wall Street Journal, the company said it had “engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the attorneys general regarding the ways Meta already works to support young people on its platforms, and how Meta is continuously working to improve young peoples’ experiences.”

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Meta is starting to ramp up its growth-hacking tactics for Threads in a bid to boost engagement on the Twitter competitor. The social network is promoting its newest app by cross-posting Threads posts to users’ Facebook feeds, the company confirmed Monday.

It’s a familiar move for Meta, which regularly uses the Facebook feed to promote new features, including those from its other apps. The company has inserted Instagram Reels into recommendations in Facebook’s feed for years, and also allows businesses on WhatsApp to buy ads that appear in Facebook feeds. But unlike those efforts, it seems that Threads promotions on Facebook are not optional.

“We’ve launched an update to make it easier for people to see the latest content from Threads directly on Facebook and Instagram,” the company wrote in response to a Threads user who asked how to keep their posts off of Facebook. “But we’re listening to feedback like yours as we continue to build on this.”

Meta began testing the promotion of Threads posts on Instagram in August, but the move to put posts on Facebook without providing an opt-out feature, seems to be more controversial. Some users are pointing out that they use Threads much differently than Facebook and may not want their Threads posts to be put in front of their Facebook friends. 

We’ve reached out to Meta for more information about how it recommends Threads posts and if it intends to allow users to opt out of that kind of sharing. But the company has previously hinted that it would one day use its much larger apps to try and boost Threads. When Threads reached 100 million sign-ups shortly after it launched, Mark Zuckerberg remarked that the growth had happened with “mostly organic demand” and that the company hadn’t “even turned on many promotions yet.” (Interestingly, that post has since been deleted.)

Threads’ initial explosive growth proved to be short lived, however, with engagement dropping considerably in the weeks that followed. Anecdotally, the service feels much more lively in recent weeks, and downloads have started to once again tick up, according to a recent report from Insider.

But a report from analytics firm SimilarWeb, which tracks web traffic, suggests the company still has a lot of ground to make up. “In the US, where Threads attracted the most attention, September Threads usage on Android was down 40% from where it was in July,” senior insights manager David Carr wrote in the report. Given those trends, and that Meta has been steadily adding new features like post editing and keyword search, it’s maybe not all that surprising the company would now be trying to juice Threads’ growth, even if its tactics for doing so are unpopular.

As expected, the Supreme Court will weigh in on a controversial case attempting to limit contact between federal officials and social media companies. The case could have sweeping implications for how social media companies make policy and content moderation decisions.

The case stems from a lawsuit, brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, that alleges Biden Administration officials, the CDC and FBI overreached in their dealings Meta, Google and Twitter as the companies responded to pandemic and election-related misinformation. A lower court previously issued an injunction that severely limited government officials’ ability to communicate with social media companies, though some restrictions were later relaxed.

Now, with the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the government’s appeal in the case, the entire lower court order remains on hold. As The New York Times notes, three justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, dissented, calling the decision to allow the lower court order to remain paused “highly disturbing.”

It’s not the only case involving free speech and social media on the Supreme Court docket this term. The court will also take on two landmark cases that could reshape how social media platforms enforce content moderation rules. Those cases involve two state laws, in Texas and Florida, that would prevent social media companies from removing certain types of posts.

Meta is temporarily changing users’ default comment settings on Facebook as part of its response to the Israel-Hamas war. The company said in an update it was making the change in an effort to “protect people in the region from potentially unwelcome or unwanted comments.”

With the change, comments on “newly created public Facebook posts” will be limited to the user’s friends or “established followers.” The step is somewhat unusual as publicly viewable Facebook posts are typically open to comments from anyone by default. Meta didn’t specify the location or how many Facebook accounts would be affected by the change, but said it would apply broadly to “people in the region.”

The company added that all Facebook users have the ability to limit their comments, regardless of their location, and that it would notify users for whom the setting was now enabled by default. Additionally, Meta said it’s making it easier for Facebook users to bulk delete comments and that it’s “disabled the feature that normally displays the first one or two comments under posts in Feed.”

The updates appear to be meant to reduce harassment and potentially toxic comments as tensions surrounding the conflict continue to spill over onto social media. Meta also said it’s rolling out its profile “lock” tool to Facebook users “in the region.” The feature allows users to hide some previously-public parts of their profile and prevents non-friends from seeing a full-size version of their profile photos.

The company also addressed claims that their content moderation practices have unfairly suppressed some accounts posting about the conflict. Over the weekend a number of users reported that they believed they had been “shadowbanned” on Instagram for posting content about conditions in Gaza or otherwise calling attention to how the ongoing conflict is affecting Palestinians.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company had discovered and fixed a “bug” that affected the visibility of Stories and other re-shared posts “globally.” On Wednesday, the company confirmed the issues had “significantly reduced” the reach of Stories. “This bug affected accounts equally around the globe – not only people trying to post about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza – and it had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content,” Meta said. Separately, the company also fixed another “global issue” that prevented users from livestreaming on Facebook “for a short time.”

It’s not the first time questions have been raised about Meta’s response to a conflict between Israel and Hamas. In May of 2021, the last time there was a major escalation violence in the Gaza Strip, Facebook’s moderation practices violated Palestinians’ right to free expression, a report commissioned by Meta found. The report found that Meta’s systems and content reviewers had a lower accuracy rate when evaluating posts written in Palestinian Arabic, which resulted in a significant number of users being hit with “false strikes” on their accounts.

After weeks of speculation, X has confirmed its plans to charge new users for the service previously known as Twitter. The company shared details about a new subscription called “Not a Bot,” that it’s currently testing in New Zealand and the Philippines.

The subscription, which was first reported by Fortune, requires new users to pay the equivalent of $1 USD per year in order to be able to post. “As of October 17th, 2023 we’ve started testing ‘Not A Bot,’ a new subscription method for new users in two countries,” X explains. “This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount.”

Under the scheme, new users will be required to verify their phone numbers and pay the $1 fee if they want to use core features like tweets, retweets, bookmarks and likes. Those who who don’t pay will only be able to use X in a “read only” mode.

The company said that for now the fees will not apply to existing users. “It is not a profit driver,” X said.

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