Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, has announced that the platform will charge new users a fee before allowing them to post.
Musk claims that this is now the only way to address the bot problem on the platform. The billionaire said that X has tried several various approaches to solve the problem, but they haven’t worked.
Musk responded as follows to an X account that made a post regarding the X rules for new accounts: “Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots. Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.”
Musk did not, however, specify when this will be put into effect or how much the new customers will have to pay.
In the Philippines and New Zealand, X began charging newly verified users $1 annually in October of last year. While they could view the posts, new free users from these locations who signed up for the platform were unable to interact with them.
They had to pay a charge to post material, like, repost, comment, bookmark, and quote postings. Musk may impose a charge akin to those in other areas.
Elon Musk declared last week that millions of accounts would be suspended as part of an effort to purge the social media network of bot accounts and trolls.
Musk added that the business would track down and prosecute the owners of any accounts discovered to be bots in addition to suspending them.
Following complaints from users and advertisers that the social media network is populated with bots, implying that real human accounts are unimportant, this move was taken.
Bots are non-human users on X that can follow and unfollow other accounts, like other users’ posts, republish (formerly rebroadcast) tweets, and even send direct messages without human oversight.
“System purge of bots & trolls underway. Please reply to me or @Xeng. if legitimate accounts are suspended.”
“X Corp will be tracing the people responsible and bringing the full force of the law to bear upon them,” Musk previously stated.
Musk, who was a vocal opponent of Twitter as a bot-friendly site and even charged that the company’s prior owners had employed bots to inflate their numbers before the takeover in 2022, has been praising the growing user base on X. But he’s been forced to intervene due to a growing number of complaints over the actions of bots on the network, which might drastically lower the figures being celebrated.
