Elon Musk plans to charge new X users a small fee to enable them to post on social networks and to curb the bot problem.
In response to an
“Today's AI (and troll farms) can easily pass the question, 'Are you a bot?'” Musk said, referring to tools like CAPTCHA.
Unfortunately, the only way to limit the relentless attacks of bots is to pay a small fee for write access for new users.
Today's AI (and troll farms) can easily pass the question, “Are you a bot?”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2024
As with many announcements related to social platforms, there are currently no details on when this policy will go into effect or what fees new users will have to pay.
Last October, X started charging new unverified users $1 a year in New Zealand and the Philippines. New free users who signed up to the platform from these regions were able to read posts but were unable to interact with them. You had to pay to post content such as liking, reposting, replying to, bookmarking, and quoting posts. Mr. Musk may apply similar fees to other regions.
Earlier this month, X announced that the platform We were beginning a large-scale deletion of spam accounts., warns users that their follower count may be affected. But with plans to charge new users, the social media company appears to be aiming to better deal with the bot problem.
Today, we are launching a significant and proactive effort to remove accounts that violate our rules against platform manipulation and spam. While we aim to be accurate in the accounts we remove, we cast a wide net to ensure X is safe and free of bots. As…
— Safety (@Safety) April 4, 2024
While Musk has talked about fighting AI bots, Company X updated its policy last year to include a clause that allows public posts to be used to train machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence models. Separately, Musk said in July 2023 that his AI company, xAI, would use public posts to train models.
Earlier this month, xAI made its Grok chatbot available to X premium users who pay $8 per month. This chatbot was previously available to users who pay $16 per month for her Premium+ level. Last week, Fortune reported that X plans to let users use Grok to create posts.