On the internet, upsetting people pays. It always has: long before social networks were even imagined, the web gave rise to email and forums which created new ways for people to argue with each other.
But in recent years, that payment has come more often in the form of cash, as social networks try to find ways to keep readers engaged and posters sharing. And some of those payments have come to notable people: this week, it emerged that three Reform MPs – including Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson – have together been paid more than £10,000 for their posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.
It has led to sharp criticism. “The fact that Reform MPs are profiting financially from posting on Musk’s X tells us all we need to know about how genuine their motives are,” said Carla Denyer, MP for Bristol Central and Green Party co-leader, and the Labour Party suggested that it was evidence that the politicians involved are “grifters who do it just to make money”.
But the issue points to a central question about social networks: what kind of content do they promote, either by paying or through the more diffuse choices they make about their algorithms? And, perhaps more importantly, what differences do those decisions make to our society?
The answers to those questions have defined our political and social landscape in this century. But they are changing as social networks do, as their power within society increases but their ability to actually get people to post good content perhaps falls.
The Reform MPs involved in the latest story are not alone in making money from X. Soon after the company launched the programme in the summer of 2023, it said that it would be available globally to everyone who meets its eligibility requirements, which require users to pay for a subscription as well as having enough followers and impressions. The aim was to make X “the best place on the internet to earn a living as a creator”, it said then.
X didn’t say so, but the decision might also have been an attempt to ensure that people would still post on X: in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of what was then Twitter, many of its most high-profile voices quit. One of Twitter’s great fortunes was that it convinced much of the news and media industry that it was advantageous to freely provide it content – all through the day, often exclusively and usually before anyone else – but that pull became lessened as posting on X became less appealing and social networks lost some of their glitz.
Even from the start, X’s revenue sharing system prioritised engagement over substance. At the beginning, it said that the revenue being shared with creators was not from the ads shown in the news feed but instead those that show in the replies to a post, which means that what users really want to generate is replies. Late last year, X changed that system, so that users would receive money from the subscription fee paid by premium users – that was done in an effort to ensure that paying subscribers could give money to their favoured creators by engaging with their posts. That leaves many of the same incentives in place, however, and might indeed make them even stronger given that subscribers to X’s premium offering tend to be those ideologically aligned with Elon Musk.
The revenue sharing programme is open to all: the £10,000 earned by the three Reform MPs is a lot of money but relatively low when compared to payments shared by some of its creators. No other MPs have registered earnings from the site, but that is a reflection not of the popularity of their content but presumably because they are not signed up to X’s premium membership. The system might tend towards inflammatory posts but it is not inherently right-wing.
There are some limitations on what those users can say. Users should not be paid for hateful posts or those that steal copyrighted content, for instance, and Elon Musk has claimed that the system is built for accuracy. But it also encourages users to create the kinds of posts that will make people argue.
X/Twitter is far from unique in prioritising engagement, even if not all sites pay for it. On Instagram’s Threads, for instance – which was rushed to market as an attempt to take advantage of waning interest in Twitter – posts written specifically to entice engagement abound. That often includes getting things intentionally wrong, posting inflammatory political opinions that are usually presented in a faux-naive style, or writing threads that end on a cliffhanger to encourage people to click through to see the usually disappointing second post. None of them leads to a particularly healthy public discourse, and they sometime do much worse.
And Elon Musk’s platform was actually relatively late to introduce its revenue sharing programmes. Meta doesn’t pay for content or views but every other major platform does, including YouTube and TikTok. YouTube’s ad revenue model has supported a whole community of creators, some of whom such as Mr Beast are using the money generated through that system to fund videos that rival the production value of TV shows. Those platforms have made vast sums of money from creators who often expend personal resources to entertain their users on their behalf – and so it seems only right that they give some of that back to them.
And so the Reform MPs are only one tiny slice of a media landscape that is shifting underneath us. The same system does not just reward political views – but takes in everything from Mr Beast at the top to small Threads users pretending to be stupid at the bottom.
This article was originally published by a www.independent.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .