Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters
Elon Musk is considering charging all users to use X, the platform formally known as Twitter, in an effort to combat bots.
Musk met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, where Netanyahu questioned Musk about what steps could be taken to combat the “armies of bots” who are spreading hate speech on the platform, such as anti-semitism.
Musk told Netanyahu that he was considering a subscripton for all users to make “the effective cost of bots” very high. Musk also proposed requiring operators to use a new payment method for each account.
“We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” Musk told Netanyahu, although Musk didn’t elaborate on what the monthly fee would be.
Musk didn’t provide a timeline for this new plan or what the fee would be, only saying that it would cost “a few dollars or something”.
Musk posted on X recently that the company still has “negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.
X does currently have an optional monthly subscription called X Blue, formerly Twitter Blue, that is priced at $8 per month. Benefits of X Blue include verified check-mark status, allow the ability to edit a post within a one-hour window, a 50% reduction in ads, “prioritized rankings” of a user’s posts in conversations and search, the ability to post up to 25,000 characters, and the ability to upload videos up to 3 hours long or up to 8 gigabytes in size, as well as receiving a share of advertising revenue based on ads displayed in replies to their posts.
