Twitter’s New Promise to Pay Content Creators Has One Big Catch

It was always leading up to this. The rife misinformation, the skewed financial incentives, the promises for something greater, something worthwhile, something of purpose: Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is now, for all intents and purposes, a multilevel marketing scheme:

Musk’s explanation comes after a stream of Twitter’s verified users—often far-right and conspiratorial ones—received thousands of dollars for helping bring eyeballs to embedded ads within Twitter’s interface.

As per Musk, the apparent big catch is that verified users only make money off of other verified users, creating what amounts to the combination of an MLM and conspiratorial echo chamber.

While some users like Brian Krassenstein—known first as an anti-Trump content factory, now as a generically liberal voice is also quite friendly toward the rest of the Twitter Blue community—have made money, many of the Twitter payments to “content creators” seem to have gone to users who have whipped up hateful and dangerous conspiracies. These users have also been at the forefront of implicitly or explicitly prodding more people to join the subscription program helping keep Musk’s Twitter Blue afloat.

Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right user who once used his massive platform to falsely identify an innocent Black man as the “number one suspect” in the shooting of two police officers, said he received over $16,000 from Twitter.

“I hear some asking, ‘Why aren’t liberals and leftists getting paid for Twitter? Why is it just people Elon seems to like?’” Cheong tweeted when announcing the news. “Oh I don’t know, could it be because they boycotted Twitter Blue, refused to sign up for monetization, and staged failed walkoffs to Mastodon and elsewhere?”

“Twitter Monetization For Creators Is REAL,” sensationalist provocateur Benny Johnson also celebrated, announcing his nearly $10,000 paycheck from the Big Tech elite billionaire.

“That’s insane! I need in on this,” one user tweeted in response.

“Just sign up for subscriptions in Twitter Blue — the rest happens automatically,” Johnson responded, spreading the good word about the product. “Really easy! Do it,” he urged. Johnson repeated such assurances of the billionaire’s lackluster product to similarly wistful repliers.

And such is the undergirding framework of Twitter: the few profiting most from Musk’s takeover ambling to enchant the many into buying into the whole scheme too. A scheme whose promises grow bigger the more that people join, but whose actual rewards remain largely at the top. Twitter, indeed, is an MLM.

The first rollout of paychecks comes after Musk’s competitor, Zuckerberg’s Threads, announced over 100 million sign-ups. Musk has maintained that the timing is coincidental, but something else to keep in mind is Musk often has not told the truth and is making up Twitter policy as he goes. “Any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model,” one former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships said. “This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

A Florida Republican politician suggested that Pride images are “anti-Christian” hate symbols and called for the government to immediately “crush” Pride Month.

Anthony Sabatini, who currently serves as the chair of the Lake County Republican Party, slammed Pride Month as “anti-American” and proposed ways the state government could effectively end LGBTQ pride celebrations.

“There’s a great reset going on. And I say, well, if you look around, really, I think the great reset is a gay reset. I mean, if you look at Pride Month, that’s pretty much, like, the whole program,” Sabatini, who is running for Congress, said at an event. It is not clear when the event took place, but video of his speech was posted to Twitter on Friday by liberal activist Lauren Windsor.

“We have to end Pride Month, okay?” Sabatini continued to applause from the audience. “We have to crush Pride Month. It has to go away.”

“It’s time to crush Pride Month and the businesses that promote that toxic anti-American garbage.”

Sabatini suggested the Florida government should pass a law banning all counties, school boards, city commissions, and even businesses from promoting Pride Month in any way. He pointed to the city of Mount Dora, which marked Pride by hanging rainbow banners along the streets.

“First we need to crush Pride Month” by banning people from spending state or local funds on it, Sabatini said. “We need to bend our civil rights laws to make it actionable legally for when they do do that because it’s an anti-Christian hate symbol.”

Republicans across the country are steadily making the U.S. more hostile to LGBTQ people, and Florida is leading the charge. State lawmakers have passed laws expanding “Don’t Say Gay,” banning discussions of personal pronouns in schools, and prohibiting transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender on any public property. Meanwhile, Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month shared what is possibly the most bigoted ad ever for his presidential campaign.

And it’s not just at the state level. The Supreme Court ruled in June that businesses can refuse to serve LGBTQ people, which has already spurred more discrimination. And on Friday, the House of Representatives passed a defense budget that bans the Department of Defense from flying Pride flags or reimbursing travel costs for service members who seek gender-affirming care.

The House of Representatives on Friday passed a defense budget that was loaded with Republican amendments aimed at furthering their culture wars.

The House voted 219–210 for the newly extreme bill, which now bans the Department of Defense from flying Pride flags, funding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and reimbursing travel costs for service members who need to get an abortion.

Four Democrats broke ranks to vote with Republicans. Here are the Democrats who voted for the defense budget in all its bigoted glory.

• Donald Davis of North Carolina
  
• Jared Golden of Maine
  
• Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington
  
• Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico
  

This is not the first time that some of these members have sided with Republicans. Golden and Perez voted in May to repeal President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program and to end the federal student loan repayment freeze. Davis also voted Thursday to include the Pride flag ban amendment in the defense budget.

Two Democrats—one poised to be the party’s next anointed Kyrsten Sinema—helped Republicans codify Donald Trump’s policy banning the Defense Department from displaying Pride flags.

The amendment to the national defense bill came from Republican Representative Ralph Norman, as part of the stream of culture war issues the party took up before they voted to shove another nearly trillion more dollars into the military industrial complex.

In a 218–213 vote late Thursday, the House approved the amendment that would ban members of the armed forces or civilian employees from displaying any flag other than the American, or other limited approved flags like state or military service ones, or flags of another country that is “an ally or partner of the United States.” The amendment was widely interpreted as one targeting Pride flags in particular.

A Norman aide noted that while the Pentagon hasn’t flown a Pride flag, the goal of the amendments is to get ahead of the trend of more and more agencies displaying Pride flags, even simply on social media accounts. Acts as extreme as the Navy having a rainbow Twitter banner during Pride month this year were enough to light the fire underneath 218 House members to put the foot down on letting anyone imagine that military members might be gay.

The amendment codifies a Trump-era (and Biden-upheld) policy that bans Pride flags from military bases. Such an amendment even got three Republican dissenters in Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, and Marcus Molinaro.

Still, two Democrats decided the bigoted ban was one worth adding to the defense bill: Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin and North Carolina’s Don Davis.

Davis may be triangulating as he anticipates unfavorable gerrymandering from state Republicans. Nevertheless a weak excuse, as it is politically inept for Democrats to legitimize such causes as anything more than paltry culture war. Relatedly, Davis also joined eight Democrats—including those who voted against student debt relief—in approving Republican Chip Roy’s amendment to ban funds from going towards teaching critical race theory.

Such urgent priorities these Democrats bravely gave credence to.

Slotkin, for her part, said her vote was “to ban hateful flags from flying on military bases, particularly the Confederate flag,” arguing that the most sound way to ban “hateful flags” was by pursuing a near-universal flag ban.

Slotkin may very well have believed her vote to be more about banning hateful symbols at the relatively smaller expense of banning Pride flags. Even if that was the case—and considering that the entire Democratic caucus otherwise voted against the amendment—the vote adds to a broader record of the Democrats’ heir-apparent Michigan Senate candidate dissenting against other caucus-wide causes.

Previously, Slotkin has opposed student debt assistance on a vote supported by 93 percent of the caucus, voted against 85 percent of her caucus on whether the United States should simply study the impact of its sanctions on other countries, voted to overturn locally enacted criminal justice and voting rights reforms in Washington, D.C., and even voted against 94 percent of her caucus to bar security clearance from anyone who has used cannabis.

Slotkin also does not openly support Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or abolishing the death penalty. And now, she has signed on to a Republican-led bill that bans members of the armed service from displaying a Pride flag.

Michigan is part of Democrats’ growing midwestern blue wall—a region where the party has shown, over and over again, how strong commitments to progressive causes can actually manifest into meaningful change for millions of people. But Slotkin is proving over and over again her incongruence with that possibility.

This article has been updated.

House Republicans voted Friday to add hundreds of amendments to the defense bill, successfully using the budget as a tool in their culture wars.

The House of Representatives voted 219–210 for the amended bill, completely along party lines. The measure now goes to the Democratic-controlled Senate, where the GOP’s ideological amendments have little chance of passing.

The Republicans’ extreme changes include banning the Department of Defense from spending federal funds on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which military officials consider critical not only for recruiting fresh talent, but also for combating extremism in the ranks.

The GOP has also blocked the military from reimbursing travel expenses for service members who have to travel for an abortion. Another amendment prohibits the Defense Department from reimbursing travel costs for people who travel for gender-affirming care.

The DOD would be barred from flying Pride flags, and using federal funds to support green energy initiatives.

The radical, bigoted bill has little chance of making it through the Democratic-controlled Senate. But it’s a clear sign of the lengths that Republicans will go to wage war on things they disagree with (instead of, you know, actual issues).