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Who should pay money for X in the future
Elon Music wants to curb automated bot accounts on X. photo
© Monika Skolimowska/dpa
It is a “tiny amount,” says X boss Elon Musk. Why publishing posts might cost money in the future.
It was a “tiny amount,” he emphasized, without giving a number. After three months on X, new users should be allowed to post for free, he added.
Before taking over Twitter in October 2022, Musk had repeatedly denounced that the service had too many automated bot profiles. He promised to get the problem under control. Musk now complained that current AI programs could easily pass the common tests used to expose bot accounts.
X has been testing the latest countermeasure since the fall. Initially in New Zealand and the Philippines, new users of the service could only publish posts and quote or redistribute others’ posts by paying a fee of one US dollar per year. For free, they could only use X passively: read posts, watch videos, follow other users.
Since Musk’s takeover and the renaming to X, the service has been plagued by falling sales. He said several times that advertising revenue, from which Twitter almost exclusively made its money, had roughly halved. Many companies feared a negative environment for their brands on Musk’s platform and limited or abandoned ads on X.