The owner of X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk, has announced that plans to charge new users on the platform to pay a fee before they can post.
According to Musk, this has become the only solution to tackle the issue of bots on the platform. The billionaire indicated that several other measures being put in place by X to address the issue have failed.
Replying to an X account that posted about the X policy on new accounts, Musk said: Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots. Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.”
However, Musk did not provide the details of when this will be implemented and how much the new users will be charged.
Last October, X started charging new unverified users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines. New free users signing up for the platform from these regions could read the posts but could not interact with them.
To post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark, and quote posts, they had to pay a fee. Musk might apply a fee similar to other regions.
In a recent post, Elon Musk announced that a cleanup to rid the social media platform of bot accounts and trolls had begun and would lead to the suspension of millions of accounts.
In addition, he said the company would not only suspend any account found to be bots but would also trace the owners and prosecute them.
This action came on the heels of complaints by users and advertisers that the social media platform is populated by bots, suggesting that the real human accounts are insignificant.
Bots are non-human users on X that do not need any supervision to perform actions such as liking posts of other users, reposting (formerly retweeting) tweets, following and unfollowing other accounts, and even sending direct messages.
Im all in elon. I choose you to always my ❤️