Elon Musk's announcement this Wednesday didn’t come as a shock due to previous interviews where the Tesla boss said X, formerly known as Twitter, will be rolling out some updates to eliminate bot accounts completely and also make the community a home for all.
In today’s announcement, Musk said through the ‘X’ support page that the social media giant will be charging a fee of $1 to any new member joining the platform henceforth. However, this update will start in New Zealand and the Philippines before it goes global, but existing ‘X’ users won’t be affected.
X users will be able to post content, reply, like, repost, bookmark, and quote when they make the annual subscription of $1. New free users who opt out of this annual fee of $1 will only get a read-only account to view posts, watch videos, and follow accounts.
On the X platform, the company stated,
- This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver. And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale.
- This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected.