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Social media platform X is pausing the rollout of a new policy for paying creators, which would have taken effect starting this Thursday.
The new rules would have placed more emphasis on engagement from local audiences in a creator’s region or country to determine the revenue a creator generates.
It was intended to discourage creators from posting about the United States or Japan — countries with the largest number of users on the platform — and effectively “gaming” the system to attract more attention to their posts, according to X’s head of product, Nikita Bier’s announcement on X on Tuesday.
Bier noted the large amounts of content about US politics generated by users based outside of the US.
The proposed change triggered backlash from creators globally, with some pointing out that they posted about a range of topics beyond politics and that the presence of users from their country was fairly small.
Faced with a barrage of criticism, Elon Musk replied to a user on X hours after the announcement, writing: “We will pause moving forward with this until further consideration”.
The proposed rule change came amidst a wider move by the social platform to provide more information about accounts to avoid the spread of misinformation.
Last November, the platform introduced a new field in the profile information section to show the country or region an account is based in.