When you go to the App Store page of the X application, the “In-app purchases” section highlights four accounts: Elon Musk, Actualité Barca, Jackson Hinkle and Zoé Sagan. This choice of the social network, which is not really one, provokes a strong reaction.
Does X (Twitter) intentionally use its App Store page to promote conspiracy accounts, as some have suspected since June 19? The reality is a little more nuanced.
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When you go to the X application page on an iPhone, a section In-App Purchases, which takes the form of a drop-down menu, highlights six subscriptions to X Premium (monthly and annual) and four accounts, including two which fall into conspiracy theories (Jackson Hinkle in the United States, Zoé Sagan in France, renowned for their viral and often conspiratorial publications). The presence of the account of Elon Musk, the owner of the social network, also questions the will of X. What is it really?
Apple makes a top 10 best sellers
Did X intentionally put these four accounts forward? The answer is no: it is an automatic display common to all applications in the App Store.
To have the right to sell content in its application, X must declare “in-app purchases” to Apple, like other developers. Prices are not the same on the App Store and on the X website, since Apple takes a 30% commission on all purchases. It is for this reason that it requires all developers to go through its payment engine if they wish to offer subscriptions, with the obligation to create a different entry for each “product” on sale.
On X, in addition to subscriptions to super follow” before the arrival of Elon Musk). In exchange for a monthly fee, a creator can offer exclusive tweets to his community (or just ask them to support him).
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Each local version of the App Store operates as its own business, making the French version of X different from the one you can find in the United States.
In the name of transparency, Apple highlights the top 10 best-selling in-app purchases on each application, to give users examples of use of the service they wish to download. In other words: Elon Musk, Actualité Barca, Jackson Hinkle and Zoé Sagan are the four accounts that sell the most subscriptions via the App Store in France. There was no manual promotion by Twitter.
Do the French massively subscribe to conspiracy accounts?
In France, the top 10 most popular in-app purchases in the X application, from an iPhone, are therefore as follows:
- X Premium (1 month)
- X Premium Basic (1 month)
- X Premium Plus (1 month)
- Subscription to Elon Musk (1 month)
- X Premium (1 year)
- Subscription to Barça News (1 month)
- X Premium Basic (1 year)
- X Premium Plus (1 year)
- Subscription to Jackson Hinkle (1 year)
- Subscription to Zoé Sagan (1 year)
Does this mean that Elon Musk, Actualité Barça, Jackson Hinkle and Zoé Sagan have thousands of paying subscribers, who send them a salary every month? Potentially, but not necessarily.
The top 10 displayed by Apple undoubtedly corresponds to reality, but does not provide a scale. Zoé Sagan could come in 10th place with several thousand paying subscribers… or just a few dozen. This ranking only concerns purchases from an iPhone which, remember, are more expensive than on the web. It could therefore perfectly distort reality.
On Android, where Google also takes 30%, the Play Store simply says that X sells subscriptions between 0.99 euros and 349.99 euros per month (the maximum price of subscriptions). It is therefore not possible to know whether the conspiracy trend on the French App Store is confirmed in the second major ecosystem.
Even if Twitter does not voluntarily promote conspiracy accounts on the App Store, it decides whether or not to grant the right to sell subscriptions to a creator. The social network has the unfortunate tendency to leave requests pending, but seems to be more flexible with certain large accounts that are nevertheless problematic. We cannot therefore completely absolve him of a certain responsibility.
Regardless, it is worth remembering that the majority of Twitter users do not pay 1 euro to the application. Even if the existence of certain paid subscriptions is disturbing, it is only a bubble within the application.