All X Users Must Pay to Stop Bot Accounts, Elon Musk Announces
- MarketWatch
Jakarta – Elon Musk has announced plans the X, formerly known as Twitter platform will become entirely paid for its users means it's not free to use anymore.
The world’s richest man revealed the planned paywall during a chat with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he was asked how he intends to deal with the large armies of bots that amplify hate speech.
“The single most important reason we’re moving to have a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Elon Musk replied.
He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots.
Musk didn’t confirm what the new subscription payment would cost, but described it as a “small amount of money"
Elon Musk.
- Stars and Stripes
Every time a bot makers want to create a bary bot, they need a new payment method. Musk did not say how much the new subscription payment would cost, but described it as 'a small amount of money'.
During the conversation, Musk also shared new metrics for X, noting that the site now has 550 million monthly users, which generates 100 to 200 million posts every day.
However, it's unclear whether Musk counts bot accounts - good bots like news feeds or bad bots like spammers - among those numbers.
It is also not possible to compare these numbers directly with Twitter's user base before Musk, which was calculated using a special metric created by Twitter called 'average monetizable daily active users' or mDAU.
This old metric shows users on Twitter who can be monetized by viewing its ads. During its last public earnings in Q1 2022, Twitter had 229 million mDAUs.
Musk did not elaborate further on his plans to charge for X or when the change would occur. But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has encouraged its users to adopt its paid subscription product, X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue).
This service, which costs US$8 per month or US$84 per year, offers features such as the ability to edit posts, half the ad load, priority ranking in search and conversations, the ability to write longer posts, and more.
X does not disclose how many paid subscribers it has, but independent research shows X Premium has not attracted the majority of X users. An analysis says that only 827,615 users are currently subscribed to X Premium.
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