Some users on X who share content that includes election misinformation, AI images, and conspiracy theories say they are being paid “thousands of dollars” by X
Some users on X who spend their days sharing content that includes election misinformation, AI-generated images … Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to . Forums: r/centrist Mastodon: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life@mas.to : Tired: Hiring a Trust & Safety team to stop election misinformation. — Wired: Firing your Trust & Safety team and paying users to post election misinformation. — https://www.bbc.com/... Forums: r/centrist : Elon Musk is paying X users thousands of dollars for posting fake news and disinformation as well as personally amplifying their posts.
Context & Ripple Effects
The reports arrive after coverage of foreign propaganda accounts flourishing on X and an instance in which X’s Explore page promoted a false Iran-Israel headline. Together, they raise the question of whether the platform’s distribution and payment systems can reward the same material its trust-and-safety functions are meant to contain.
X remains valuable to intensely political users, with candidates and DC insiders continuing to use its paid tools. That makes claims that political misinformation can generate meaningful creator income consequential beyond any individual account.
First-order effects
- Accounts posting election misinformation, AI-generated images and conspiracy theories may have a direct financial reason to sustain or increase that output, according to their claims.
- X faces sharper scrutiny of whether its creator-payment rules and enforcement practices are rewarding harmful political content.
Second-order effects
- Political campaigns, journalists and other heavy X users may have to spend more effort distinguishing organic engagement from financially motivated misinformation.
- Advertisers and creators seeking brand-safe reach may reassess the reputational risk of participating in a feed where provocative political material can be monetized.
Third-order effects
- If engagement-linked payouts consistently reward misleading political material, platform monetization can turn distribution incentives into a trust-and-safety problem rather than a separate creator-economy feature.
- The pattern points toward demand for more transparent payout, provenance and ranking controls—especially as synthetic images make low-cost political content easier to produce.
The trend: Political-platform monetization is increasingly intertwined with the incentives that determine which synthetic and polarizing content gets produced and amplified.