- Elon Musk has plans to charge new users to enable them to post on X
- He says it’s a means to stop the influx of bots onto the social media site
- X has been purging spam accounts this month
Elon Musk has said he is planning to bring in a small fee that new users on X (formerly Twitter) will have to pay before they are allowed to post on the social network, in a bid to address the problem of bots on the site.
Musk confirmed this in a post on X in reply to an X account that had posted about the proposed policy. “Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots,” he wrote. “Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease.”
He added in a later reply that new users could be able to write for free three months after registering.
However, other than Musk’s postings, there are no details currently about how much the fee would be – although Musk said it would be “tiny” – or when the policy might be enacted.
X has been conducting a purge of spam accounts this month – warning users that their follower numbers may drop as a result. Bots have long been a problem on X – something Musk mentioned when he bought the site – and it seems other measures have failed to tackle this. With the advent of AI, the sophistication of bots has grown in recent months.
X has already run a trial of charging new users to the site. Last year, new unverified users in New Zealand and the Philippines were charged $1 to be able to post content and interact with other posts on the site – without the fee, users could only read posts. This could be a model that Musk rolls out on a wider scale.
