Elon Musk threatens to suspend X accounts doing engagement farming

The owner of X, Elon Musk, has said he will suspend all accounts found to be doing engagement farming on the social media platform.

Several users on X are engaging in farming to boost their earnings from the content creator monetization program of the platform. This comes as the billionaire struggles to get rid of bots and fake accounts from X, formerly known as Twitter.

Engagement farming refers to when someone posts generic or obnoxious content to get likes or replies. The goal is to get people to interact with the tweet, which may lead to followers and more earnings.

“Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source,” Musk posted on Friday.

Aside from boosting their chances of getting paid by the platform, individuals and organizations use engagement farming to to artificially inflate their online presence and influence.  This involved unethical practices and the use of fake accounts or tools to inflate metrics such as likes, retweets, and follower counts.

This activity disrupts the organic flow of information on X, and manipulated content lowers genuine voices. By blocking such accounts, X Crop aims to foster an original and organic online environment where content is rated based on its originality.

Meanwhile, X users have been reacting to the warning from Musk. For most of the users that commented on Musk’s post, suspending such accounts would be a huge relief for them having been coping with irrelevant posts for some times now.

Responding to Musk’s post, an X user, @rawsalerts, said:

• “Finally, thank God! This is much needed. I’m so tired of seeing clickbait pages and those who put out fake news solely for engagement farming just for clicks, likes, and comments, and solely for profit, nothing else. It’s been cluttering up mine and many others’ feeds with irrelevant content.”

Another user, @BillyM2K posted:

• “If this means people who purposefully lie for clicks repeatedly, this is a long overdue rule, and accounts with major amounts of community notes for being purposely misleading should at the very least be demonetized in my opinion.”

For X user, @gorpher_marc, suspending engagement farming accounts would restore sanity on X.

• “If this means suspending accounts that consistently reply to large accounts spamming unrelated content, that would be amazing! I miss when replies were in response to the original post,” he post.