CEO of SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, has unveiled plans to implement a small fee for new users signing up on the social media platform in a bid to address the issue of bots infiltrating the platform.
Responding to a post by an X account regarding changes on the platform’s website, Musk stressed that charging a nominal fee to new accounts was the “only way” to counter the “onslaught of bots.”
“Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease,” Musk stated, speaking on the challenges posed by automated tools like CAPTCHA. He later clarified in another reply that new accounts would be granted posting privileges after three months of creation without requiring payment.
While specifics regarding the implementation timeline and fee structure for new users remain undisclosed, Musk’s announcement aligns with X’s previous initiative last October, where new unverified users in New Zealand and the Philippines were charged $1 annually. These users were restricted to reading posts and had to pay a fee to interact with content.
X has also recently initiated a crackdown on spam accounts, cautioning users about potential impacts on their follower counts. However, with the introduction of user fees for new sign-ups, the social media platform aims to combat the bot problem more effectively.
Despite Musk’s emphasis on combating AI bots, X’s policies have included clauses allowing public posts to be used for training machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence models. In a separate development, Musk’s AI company xAI has announced plans to leverage public posts for model training.
xAI has made its Grok chatbot accessible to Premium users of X, who pay $8 per month, down from the previous Premium+ tier priced at $16 per month. Additionally, reports suggest that X intends to expand Grok’s availability to all users for composing posts.
