Elon Musk plans to charge new X users to stop bots

Elon Musk has announced to charge a small fee from users for tweeting on social media platform X to fight bots and fake users, Pymnts reported.

The company started testing last October by charging users in the Philippines and New Zealand a $1 yearly subscription charge. Musk might use a similar approach in other regions as well.

Replying to a user account on X, the Tesla owner wrote, “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.”

In a follow up reply he wrote, “The onslaught of fake accounts also uses up the available namespace, so many good handles are taken as a result.”

An automated account created to monitor changes on X was the source of the initial rumors about the policy change. This policy change is a result of the detection of millions of bot accounts that link to pornographic or false product material.

Nothing further about the new policy has been made public as of yet. The newly signed-in users on the platform in these regions could read the posts but couldn’t interact with them.

To post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark, and quote posts, they had to pay a fee.