Elon Musk reportedly pays thousands of dollars to well-known right wing liars, trolls, racists, and misinformers who spout false claims on Twitter, (renamed X). Musk has recently come under fire from Media Matters, which reported that major companies’ ads pop up next to pro-Hitler, neo-Nazi Twitter users. Media Matters also reported that Musk endorsed an anti-Semetic conspiracy theory. Musk filed a lawsuit against Media Matters on Nov. 20.
Vox reports how the system at Twitter works:
Twitter shares an undisclosed percentage of the ad revenue it gets from replies to people’s tweets, directly to the user. So the more people reply to a user’s tweets and ads in those replies get viewed, the more money you’ll get.
Twitter rewards right wing political liars, while ignoring widely-known non-political users, notes The Washington Post:
The first beneficiaries appear to be high-profile far-right influencers who tweeted before the announcement how much they’ve earned as part of the program. Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson and Ashley St. Clair all touted their earnings.
“Wow. Elon Musk wasn’t kidding. Content monetization is real,” tweeted an anonymous account called End Wokeness, with 1.4 million followers, accompanied by a screenshot showing earnings of over $10,400.
…Andrew Tate, for example, who was recently released from jail on rape and human trafficking charges, posted that he’d been paid over $20,000 by Twitter.
“This is a nice turnaround from being banned by Twitter 1.0 for almost 2 years to now being paid to post Thank you @elonmusk,” tweeted far-right influencer Rogan O’Handley, known as DC Draino…
Some nonpolitical contributors expressed frustration with the lack of transparency from the company over the rollout of the program.
“My tweets have generated 100s of millions of impressions for Twitter every year,” Matt Navarra, a social media strategist who runs the tech-focused newsletter and community Geekout, posted on Thursday. “And I’ve been on the platform for 15+ years. It’s pretty lame there is no payout coming my way. Twitter has never generated any income directly for all the content I have put in to it.”
…One former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said that “any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model. This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”
The former Twitter executive also cast doubt on Twitter’s revamped metrics, including impressions. “The numbers are totally and completely bogus. It’s all completely made up. It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”
“He’s censoring speech that he doesn’t like and amplifying speech that he does, and he’s picking the people that he wants to have a voice on the platform and silencing others,” said Rathbone DeBuys, a musician and content creator in New Orleans, who monetizes on TikTok. “It seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to it. He’s decided arbitrarily that these are the people who are going to make money off the platform because these are [his] friends.”
(Sources: The Washington Post, Media Matters, Media Matters, Vox, Rolling Stone, Image: Benny Johnson/YouTube)