Elon Musk has announced a plan to charge new users a small fee to encourage sharing on social media platform X and prevent bot problems.
In response to a post on X, Musk said that charging new accounts a nominal fee is the “only way” to stop “bot attacks“.
Musk also said that existing tools, such as artificial intelligence and troll farms, can easily circumvent verification methods such as CAPTCHA. Here are all the details…
If you’re new to X, you may have to pay to share
On Monday, the X Updates Radar account posted about a small annual fee that new users would have to pay to use the platform. Musk responded to the post that this change was real.
Text strings change detected (Website). pic.twitter.com/L5PGb79bCF
— X Updates Radar (@xUpdatesRadar) April 15, 2024
Later, in a response to another user, he added that new accounts could be posted without paying the fee after three months.
In another tweet, Musk noted that new users will have to pay this fee for three months, but after that, writing access will be free.
X has tested this tactic before, charging $1 for new accounts in New Zealand and the Philippines in October.
Musk’s aim seems to be to paint an image of Cybertruck, with its artificial intelligence and robots, wanting to exist on the future frontiers. However, it is stated that he still has no clear plan to stop the bots in X. One of the main reasons X launched the $8 monthly subscription fee was to prevent bots from taking over the platform. However, scammers found bots useful and used verified bot accounts in their scams.
Musk notes that since he took over Twitter in 2022, the platform has faced several problems. These include scammers spoofing the platform, automatically changing Twitter URLs to X.com, and redirecting users to scam sites.
Featured image credit: Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash
