Elon Musk wants new users of his online platform X to pay money in the first few months so that they can publish posts on the Twitter successor service. This is the only way to curb the activity of automated bot accounts, Musk wrote on X on Monday. It is a “tiny amount,” he emphasized, without giving a number. After three months at 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. In the meantime, he even tried to use this reason to get out of the around $44 billion deal to buy the platform. But the prospect of being forced into court to buy Twitter ultimately persuaded him to complete the takeover. Afterwards, Musk repeatedly promised to get the bot and spam 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 paywall as a countermeasure in New Zealand and the Philippines since the fall. New users of the service could only publish posts and quote or redistribute other people’s posts after paying one US dollar per year. For free, they could only use X passively: i.e. read posts, watch videos and follow other users. But skepticism arose during the tests last year. IT security expert Marcus Hutchins noted that he could not think of any bot activity that could be stopped with a fee of one dollar per year. The step is more likely to cost the platform money. “Spammers will use stolen credit cards – and the cost of chargebacks will be higher than subscription revenue,” Hutchins wrote on Facebook’s rival service Threads Meta.
It is unusual for online platforms to charge money for basic functions. It is unclear how many users X currently has because, as a company not listed on the stock exchange, the service does not have to provide any information about its business. Since Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X, the service has been plagued by falling sales. The new company boss said several times that advertising revenue, from which Twitter almost exclusively earned 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. In return, Musk tried to rely more heavily on subscription fees. He has already limited how many posts users can see per day without paying a fee of at least three euros per month.