Elon Musk’s X cracks down on AI deepfakes during Israel-Iran war with new revenue sharing rules

Elon Musk’s social media platform X is making major changes to its revenue-sharing programme and has warned creators about the undisclosed use of AI. The social media giant has recently gone on the front foot to regulate the rise of AI-generated content on the platform.

In a post on Tuesday, X Product Head Nikita Bier said that the company is trying to maintain access to authentic information on the ground in times of war. This has led X to now warn creators that they will be suspended from the revenue-sharing programme for 90 days if they post AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without adding a disclosure.

“Today we are revising our Creator Revenue Sharing policies to maintain authenticity of content on Timeline and prevent manipulation of the program. During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies, it is trivial to create content that can mislead people,” Bier wrote.

Starting now, users who post AI-generated videos of an armed conflict—without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI—will be suspended from Creator Revenue Sharing for 90 days. Subsequent violations will result in a permanent suspension from the program. “This will be flagged to us by any post with a Community Note or if the content contains metadata (or other signals) from generative AI tools,” he added.

Notably, X had recently rolled out a “Made with AI” label on the platform, which is shown to viewers, letting them know the post used some form of AI.

Amid the ongoing attack by the US and Israel on Iran and the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Musk and Bier had recently announced that traffic on the platform had hit a new all-time record.

X’s spam detection measures

Bier had also recently warned that the rise of AI agent platform OpenClaw could make popular forms of communication like emails, iMessages and phone calls virtually unusable due to spam. Subsequently, the company rolled out what it called spam and automation detection measures.

X warned that if it finds signs of non-human interaction on the platform, the account is at high risk of permanent suspension.

Late last year, X also announced that it had purged around 1.7 million bots that were flooding the reply sections on posts with spam.