Musk Plans to Charge New X Users to Enable Posting
The fees will be paid by new account holders for only three months.
American billionaire Elon Musk, owner and director of the X social platform, previously known as Twitter, said that he is seriously considering imposing an undisclosed amount of fees on new users in exchange for allowing them to publish content and interact with others’ posts.
Musk explained that imposing a financial fee on new X users is the only way to guarantee confrontation of robotic accounts, and to ensure that the platform is free of any farms of robots for automated interaction with content.
That is way harder than paying a tiny fee.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2024
This is only for new users. They will be able to do write actions for free after 3 months.
The businessman pointed out that the level of development reached by artificial intelligence technologies is enough to make robotic systems capable of bypassing settings and tests to distinguish between human users and robotic accounts on digital platforms.
Musk also revealed that the fees will be paid by new account holders for only three months, and after that period, use of the platform will become free.
As for following users and viewing their posts without interacting with them, these are free benefits that do not require a subscription, and therefore the new user will be able to enjoy them, even if he does not want to pay the subscription for the first three months of entering the platform.
Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2024
Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.
If the subscription is not paid, the new user, after a period of three months from creating his account on X, will be able to publish content and interact with other people’s posts for free.
In October 2023, X began a test of making new users pay an annual subscription worth only $1, in the Philippines and New Zealand, in exchange for the ability to publish content and interact with publications in various forms, but the company did not reveal its intention to generalize this experiment.