Musk wants new X users to pay for posts
Elon Musk wants new users of his online platform X to pay money in the first few months to publish posts on the Twitter successor service. This is the only way to curb the activity of automated bot accounts.
It is a "tiny amount", Musk wrote on X on Monday, without giving a figure. After three months on X, new users should be able to post for free, he added.
Before the takeover of Twitter in October 2022, Musk had repeatedly denounced the fact that there were too many automated bot profiles on the service. He promised to get the problem under control. Current AI programs could easily pass the usual tests designed to expose bot accounts, Musk now complained.
X has been testing the latest countermeasure since the fall. Initially in New Zealand and the Philippines, new users of the service were only able to publish posts and quote or share other people's posts for a fee of one US dollar per year. They could only use X passively for free: Read posts, watch videos, follow other users.
Since Musk's takeover and the renaming to X, the service has been struggling with falling sales. He said several times that advertising revenue, from which Twitter almost exclusively earned its money, had roughly halved. Many companies fear a negative environment for their brands on Musk's platform and have restricted ads on X or abandoned them altogether. (SDA)
