End of bots in X? Elon Musk plans to charge a fee to new users

Billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), plans to charge new users a fee to allow them to post on the social network. The idea, according to Musk, is to contain the action of bots – accounts programmed with artificial intelligence (AI) to publish automatically – on the platform.

For those in a hurry:

In response to User X’s post about changes to the social network, Musk wrote that charging a “small fee” to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “bot attack.”

Fee charging on X (formerly Twitter)

However, responding to another user’s post, Musk added that new accounts could post without paying any fees. Just wait three months after creating the profile.

As is the case with many announcements linked to the social network by the billionaire, there are currently no details on when this policy will be applied nor on the amount of the compensation.

This wouldn’t be the first time that X charges a fee to new users. In October 2023, the social network began charging 1 US dollar (about R$5) per year to new, unverified users in New Zealand and the Philippines.

In these regions, new users who signed up to the platform and did not pay were able to read posts, but not interact with them. To post, like, repost, reply, favorite, and cite posts, they had to pay.

Spam Hunting (with one capture)

OX reported in early April that it had initiated a “purge“from spam accounts, warning users that their follower count may be compromised.

While Musk has talked about fighting AI bots, X updated his policy in 2023 to include a provision that public posts could be used to train machine learning algorithms or artificial intelligence models. In July, Musk said his company xAI would use public posts to train models.

In early 2024, xAI made its Grok chatbot available to Premium X users, those who pay for certain privileges on the platform. Recently, the magazine Fortune revealed that the social network plans to make Grok available for users to create posts.

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Source: Olhar Digital