Elon Musk, owner of X, has hinted something today The former social network Twitter will no longer be free.
In a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk said the company would do so “Moving to a small monthly payment” for using the system This change is necessary to address the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat massive armies of bots.”Musk explained.
“Because a bot costs a fraction of a cent – let’s call it a tenth of a cent – but even if you have to pay… a few dollars or something like that, the effective cost of bots is very high.”said. Additionally, every time a bot creator wanted to create another bot, they would need another new payment method.”
Musk did not say how much the new subscription payment would costbut he described it as “small amount of money.”
During the conversation, Musk also shared new metrics for X, pointing out that eThe website now has 550 million monthly users, which generate between 100 and 200 million publications every day. However, it was not clear whether Musk counts bot posts toward these numbers.
Musk did not provide any details about his plan to charge for access X or when this change would occur. But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has been pushing users to subscribe to X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue).
This $8/month/$84/year subscription service offers a variety of features, including the ability to edit posts, half-off advertising, priority rankings in searches and conversations, the ability to write longer posts, and more.
X doesn’t disclose how many paying subscribers it has, but independent research shows that X Premium hasn’t attracted the majority of X users. An analysis found that only 827,615 users are currently subscribed to X Premium.