Musk to begin charging new X users a small fee, here's why (2024)

X, formerly Twitter, owner Elon Musk has hinted that the platform will likely ask new users to pay a small fee to access all its features. As per Musk, this small fee is necessary to control the menace of bots on the platform.

Musk’s suggestion came in response to a post by an X account detailing the changes in the micro blogging platform’s functioning.

It is important to note here that such a feature was already being tested in two countries – New Zealand and the Philippines.

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As per the X Daily News, a handle which keeps a tab on the changes and developments in the platform, the policy was being tested in the two countries to “help reduce spam and improve the experience for users overall.”

Musk’s ‘suggestion’

Replying to the thread of X Daily News, Musk stated that charging a small fee was the “only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots. Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.”

The X owner further said that the menace of bots is multi-fold as the bots and fake accounts also use the available ‘namespace’. As a result, several good handles are taken up by bots, which causes inconvenience to the real users.

As per X Daily News, the new policy change was detected on April 15, 2024. However, there is no clear indication of when this policy would be implemented, and what is the ‘small’ fee the new users will be asked to pay by the platform.

Further, in response to another X handle’s post, Musk said that this fee would be required only for new users. He also shed further light on the topic by stating that the new users “will be able to do write actions for free after 3 months.”

New Zealand and the Philippines experiment

From October 2023, X had started asking unverified new users to pay $1 per year in the two countries. New users who signed up to the platform from the regions were allowed to see posts but not interact with them without paying the fee.

The platform had made the $1 fee necessary for new users to post content and even to interact – like, repost, reply – with posts by other existing or new users.

Musk might be planning something similar for the platform’s new users globally.

Earlier this month, X Safety had mentioned in a post that they were planning to kick off an initiative that aims to rid the platform of the spamming and manipulation menace. The action was directed against bots.

X had also given users a warning that their follower count might get affected owing to the purge. However, the platform deemed the act necessary to remove bots and bring trust back in the platform.

Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, has unveiled its first multimodal model, Grok 1.5 Vision. As per reports, X had been planning to make Grok available to users for composing posts.