Elon Musk wants new users of his online platform X to pay a “tiny amount” in the first few months so that they can publish posts. The aim is to contain automated bot accounts.
New users of Twitter’s successor X boss Elon Musk announced this on X last night. An extraordinary step, as it is absolutely unusual for online platforms to charge money for basic functions.
Musk did not specify the exact amount involved. The tech billionaire simply emphasized that it was a “tiny” amount. After three months at X, new users should be allowed to post for free, he added. This is the only way to curb the activity of automated bot accounts.
It’s also about advertising revenue
The question of how many “real”, i.e. human, users Twitter/X has has always been a concern for the social network. The proportion of bot-controlled profiles in the short message service is not only relevant for the credibility of the online platform, but also for its reliability as an advertising medium.
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 cancel the $44 billion deal to buy the platform. The risk that he could be forced in court to buy Twitter ultimately led the US entrepreneur to complete the takeover.
Afterwards, Musk repeatedly promised to get the bot and spam problem under control. Musk now complained that artificial intelligence could easily pass the common tests used to expose bot accounts.
Tests in New Zealand and the Philippines
As a countermeasure, X has been testing the introduction of a fee 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 after paying one 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.
X customers run away because of hate speech
Automated bot accounts are not the only problem that X has to deal with: since Elon Musk took over on Twitter, advertising revenue has halved. Large corporations like IBM turned their backs on X after their advertisements appeared alongside posts with calls for violence or anti-Semitic slogans.
So far, X has not been able to consistently keep hate speech off the platform. It was only in April that Musk hired two new managers to make the online platform safer for users and companies.