Hours after the announcement, Elon Musk said that the company will "pause moving forward with this until further consideration," effectively stopping the changes from moving forward.
X Head of Product Nikita Bier had announced the update would take effect on Thursday, weighing impressions from a creator's home region more heavily to discourage foreign accounts from targeting US and Japanese audiences. His rationale was that the platform should disincentivize gaming the algorithm by posting about the U.S. or Japan to gain the attention of those larger audiences.
The platform's reasoning had some merit. The idea behind this was to understand if the account is authentic or a bad actor looking to spread misinformation, particularly political misinformation. However, the execution would have affected far more than bad actors. In its current state, the move would have also impacted people who post about sports, fashion, movies, or tech worldwide, and not just political accounts.
The backlash was swift, with European, African, and small-country creators warning that English-first global content would take the biggest hit. France-based creator Déborah, who says 43% of her audience is American, asked X to reconsider. "You're also penalizing a number of accounts that use the international language without any ill intent," wrote Déborah.
The economic reality for creators in smaller markets made the objections particularly sharp. Had the weighting gone live, creators in countries like Kenya, Nigeria, Portugal, or other smaller ad markets would have seen earnings drop despite large US audiences. African creators who have grown international audiences have done so against real disadvantages, smaller local Premium user bases, lower domestic ad rates, and less platform support than their counterparts in the US or Europe. Devaluing the international reach they fought to build, in the name of encouraging local growth, is not a reward.
X currently pays creators based on verified Premium impressions regardless of geography, averaging roughly $8.50 per million impressions. The platform doubled its revenue-sharing pool for 2026. That was enough to stop the rollout, initially planned for Thursday, and now suspended indefinitely.
The pause does not signal that X has abandoned its concerns about platform integrity. X still aims to curb spam and coordinated engagement farming. A more targeted version of the policy may return, separating bad actors from legitimate global creators. The platform faces a genuine problem: creators gaming the system for profit and spam networks artificially inflating engagement to boost earnings.
What X struggled to solve, however, was how to target bad actors without punishing creators whose only crime was building an audience outside their home country. For a global platform built on international discourse, that distinction matters.