• by Colin Kirkland , 4 hours ago

In an effort to cut down on hashtags and improve transparency, X has announced the integration of “Paid Partnership” labels on posts from creators involved with in-feed advertisements.

“While we want to encourage people to build their businesses on X, undisclosed promotions hurt the integrity of the product and lead people to distrust the content they read on X,” Nikita Bier, head of product at X, announced in a recent post.

Until now, creators promoting a product on X have needed to apply a hashtag – i.e. #paidpartnership or #ad – flagging their post as an advertisement. By including a platform-improved label to creator ads, X is hoping to define an ad more clearly while also complying with regulations, according to Bier.

The paid partnership label can be found in the “content disclose” setting on a creator's post and can be toggled on during or after the ad is uploaded to the X feed.

Introducing a proper label for creator-made ads, X is also cutting out hashtag clutter, which aligns with aesthetic preferences of the company’s owner Elon Musk, who has called hashtags “an aesthetic nightmare.”

Over the summer, X announced plans for a “sleeker” in-stream ad experience, which included the restriction of hashtags or urls in ad text, the limitation of one emoji per ad, and other visual specificities that strive for the avoidance of "unnecessary clutter or distractions.”

Similarly, X competitor Threads allows users only one hashtag per post, while TikTok warned frequent users in August that they should follow the “maximum 5 hashtags” per post guideline, as hashtags have become less effective for targeting due to the growth of AI recommendation systems.

Applying these aesthetic suggestions to creators also follows other social media platforms like Instagram, which have featured official paid partnership tags for years in order to follow policies enforced by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission policies, which state that “celebrities, athletes, and other influencers” must “clearly and conspicuously disclose” that posts are sponsored.