X introduces ‘Paid Partnership’ labels to replace sponsored hashtags

On Monday, social platform X announced the rollout of a new “Paid Partnership” label that creators can attach to posts to indicate that the content is an advertisement. The addition is intended to help strengthen creator transparency, making it clearer to followers when a product recommendation reflects a genuine opinion and when it is part of a paid sponsorship, while also helping users comply with rules requiring ads on social media to be clearlylabelledd.

Comparable tags have been available for years on other social platforms, including Instagram. In 2017, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned influencers that they needed to “clearly and conspicuously disclose” when an advertiser sponsored a post or when a company was otherwise supporting them. Last year, Instagram also expanded its Partnership Ads tools, allowing creators to earn money for written testimonials posted as comments on a brand’s social media content.

On X, however, creators have not previously had a built-in feature for labelling sponsored posts, which has forced them to rely on hashtags such as #paidpartnership and #ad to make those disclosures.

With the new option, creators can enable a “content disclose” setting when publishing a post to apply the Paid Partnership label, which will then appear directly beneath the post’s content. The label can also be added later if a creator forgot to enable the feature when the post originally went live. According to X’s head of product, Nikitia Bier, the feature is designed to enable creators to remain transparent with their audiences while staying in line with federal regulations.

“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,” he wrote in a post on the platform announcing the feature.

X has been trying for some time to make itself more attractive to creators, offering payouts for viral posts, ad-revenue sharing, creator subscriptions, and other monetisation tools. But as a platform more commonly associated with real-time conversations about news and events, the company has had difficulty attracting creators, many of whom still prefer to engage their audiences on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and elsewhere.

With the launch of Paid Partnership labels, X is at least making it simpler for creators to follow disclosure rules without cluttering their posts with hashtags, which have increasingly fallen out of style. When Instagram launched Threads, its rival to X, it even removed the hash symbol entirely.

X has also made other recent changes to improve the authenticity of content on the platform. Last week, the company said its API could no longer be used for programmatic replies unless the original author had @mentioned the replying user or had quoted them. The goal is to reduce the influence of spam activity generated by large language models on X. These AI-generated replies could also be used by questionable brands to respond to ads and sponsored creator posts in ways that make them appear to come from real, satisfied customers.