For safety
It begins: Elon Musk demands a participation fee for X for the first time
If you want to get in with Elon Musk, you have to pay: At least in two countries, X, formerly Twitter, now charges an entry fee.
© Britta Pedersen-Pool / Getty Images
Elon Musk expressed the idea of generally charging money for his social network X, formerly Twitter, months ago. In the first two countries the time has actually come: new accounts can only be created against payment – supposedly for security reasons.
As early as November last year, Elon Musk let it be known that he could imagine a general paywall for X, formerly Twitter (find out more here). The topic came up again in September (find out more here). The first tests are now underway in New Zealand and the Philippines with an obligation to pay for new users, regardless of whether they want to take out the premium subscription, which Musk extensively reformed shortly after he took over Twitter.
Elon Musk: one US dollar per year for X
X describes the changes on a Help page. Accordingly, a fee of one US dollar per year is required to prevent people in these countries from creating new accounts en masse, which are then misused for spam using bots (automated posts).
When taking over Twitter, Musk’s goal was to combat computer-controlled accounts that create and share mass amounts of content on the platform. He hopes that the small fee will mean that he has found an adequate means. He explained: “This is the only way to fight bots without blocking real users. It won’t stop the bots completely, but it will be 1000 times harder to manipulate the platform.”
The fee, at X”Not-A-Bot subscription“, is required as soon as a new account wants to publish content on the platform or interact with it. Musk made it clear that simply reading content remains free. But you always need an account for this – unless you have the exact one Link to a post that you can read without registering, but you can no longer see any interactions or comments.
Even though
This is unlikely to change Twitter’s balance sheet
The reason why X wants the annual US dollar could actually be just another but effective hurdle to creating new accounts. The subscription comes with additional verification of the phone number, which is hardly a significant effort for individuals, but increases the workload enormously for hundreds or even thousands of accounts. If payment by credit card is then added, i.e. entering a valid card, it is hardly worth the effort for many bot farms. By the way, anonymous registrations will then come to an end.
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If this subscription were to remain, it would probably be less harmful than initially assumed. Just a few weeks ago, it sounded as if X was planning to charge all users, new and old, a monthly fee of a few dollars. Musk did not mention a distinction between reading and writing users or the really low annual fee in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September, which led to major protests on the platform. If the current conditions remain the same after the test, there will probably be no noticeable decline in active real users – and the creation of spam accounts will actually be made more difficult.