The downside of X, as many people who have visited the platform recently might tell you, is just how polarizing and toxic it has become since Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022. It’s not a very pleasant place to spend much time in.
As The New Statesman stresses, Musk’s X-integrated AI chatbot Grok was recently used to create inappropriate deepfake images of real women and children without their consent.
The chatbot was, eventually, amended after mass outrage.
However, as Le Monde points out, French prosecutors suspect that Musk may have allegedly encouraged controversy over deepfakes on X to “artificially” increase the value of his company.
This is in reference to the merger between Musk’s SpaceX and xAI, which is to be listed on the US stock market in June 2026.
The Paris prosecutor’s office got in touch with the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission with its concerns.
In response, Musk insulted the French prosecutors as mentally deficient.
According to Le Monde, X’s chatbot, Grok, was used to generate around 3 million inappropriate images, mostly of women, but around 23k of children, in 11 days, based on data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
“The billionaire posted several messages in which he expressed delight, using numerous emojis, about his AI engine's ‘undressing’ capabilities,” Le Monde reported.
As previously mentioned, Musk caved in and amended the chatbot amid the controversy.
Another change (for the better) recently made on X is reducing payments to users who post clickbait and recycle news stories. As reported by the Guardian, this is done to prevent social media users from “flooding the timeline” with low-quality content.
Currently, the social network gives a share of advertising revenue to creators with at least 500 verified followers who generate at least 5 million views over a 3-month period.
According to X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, aggregators had their payouts slashed by 60%.
“It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait every day crowded out real creators and hurt new author growth,” Bier wrote. “X will never infringe on speech or reach – but we will not compensate for manipulation of the programme or our users.”
The Guardian notes that several right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists have been demonetized recently.
As per Bier, X is supposedly trialing new tools to identify the original authors of content and allocate a portion of revenue to them. This is done in order to encourage higher-quality, original material.
There are many differences between social networks like the controversial X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, owned by Meta. Not just on a technical level, but on a cultural one, too.
Initially, Twitter (back when it was still Twitter) focused on people sending out short messages as tweets. These days, however, if you’re a verified user who subscribes to X Premium, you can share tweets up to a whopping 25k characters in length. Regular (aka unverified) users can only send out tweets up to 280 characters, ‘TweetDelete’ explains.
Facebook users, on the other hand, can share posts that are up to 63,206 characters in length.
