Social network X announced on Monday the introduction of a new “Paid Partnership” tag that creators can apply to their posts to indicate they are advertising. The feature could help improve creator authenticity so fans know when a product suggestion is an original sentiment, versus a paid sponsorship, while also complying with regulations that say social media ads need tags.
Similar labels have existed for years on other platforms, such as Instagram, after the US Federal Trade Commission warned influencers in 2017 that they had to “clearly and prominently disclose” when a post was sponsored by an advertiser or if the company otherwise supports them. Last year, Instagram expanded Partnership Ads to allow creators to also get paid for written testimonials shared as comments on a brand’s social media posts.
Creators on X, however, had no built-in way to tag posts, leaving them to use hashtags like #paidpartnership and #ad to tag their posts.
With the new feature, creators will be able to change a new “content disclosure” setting on a post to apply the Paid Collaboration tag that will then appear directly below the post’s content. This tag can also be applied retrospectively, in case the creator forgot to use the option during the original publication. According to X’s head of product Nikitia Bier, the feature allows creators to be transparent with their followers while still complying with federal regulations.
“While we want to encourage people to build their businesses on X, unknown promotions damage the integrity of the product and lead people to distrust the content they read on X,” he wrote in a post on X. announcing the new feature.
X has tried to appeal to the creator class for some time now, offering payments for viral content, ad revenue sharing, creator subscriptions, and more. But as a platform best known as a place to discuss news and real-time events, the company has struggled to attract creators who still often prefer to reach their audiences through Instagram, YouTube and elsewhere.
By adding Paid Collaboration tags, the company is at least making it easier for creators to play by the rules without having to ruin their posts with hashtags, which have become somewhat passé. (When Instagram launched X competing Threads, it removed the hash symbol entirely, in fact.)
X has made other changes that focus on the authenticity of content on its platform. Last week, it announced that its API could no longer be used for programmatic replies unless the original author had @mentioned the user replying or the author had quoted them. This is intended to reduce the impact of LLM-generated spam activity on X. These types of AI-generated responses could also be used by shady brands to respond to creators’ ads and sponsored content as if they were other, legitimate customers enjoying the product in question.
