Elon Musk Plans To Charge a Fee For New X Users To Post on the Platform

Elon Musk is considering adding a small fee for new X users to enable them to post on the platform as a way to address the issue of bots.

Charging users a small fee for new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots,” said Musk in response to an X account that posted about changes on the platform’s website.

Referring to tools like CAPTCHA, Musk remarked, “Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease.”

Later on, when responding to another user, Musk mentioned that new accounts would gain posting privileges without a fee three months after their creation.

Details about when this policy will go into effect and the fees new users might be required to pay are not yet available.

X began charging new unverified users a yearly fee of $1 in New Zealand and the Philippines last year. This meant that while new users from these regions could read posts on X free of cost, they were unable to interact with them. To perform actions such as posting content, liking, reposting, replying, bookmarking, and quoting posts, they had to pay a fee. Musk may start implementing a similar fee structure in other regions as well.

Earlier this month, X unveiled a large-scale initiative to combat spam accounts, warning users about possible shifts to their follower counts. However, by implementing fees for new users, the social media platform seems more equipped to address the bot issue with greater efficacy.

While Musk has expressed his desire to combat AI bots, X updated its policy last year to allow public posts for training machine learning algorithms or AI models. In addition, in July 2023, Musk mentioned that his AI company xAI would use public posts for model training.

Earlier this month, xAI introduced its Grok chatbot to X’s Premium users, who pay a monthly fee of $8. Previously, this feature was exclusive to users subscribed to the Premium+ tier, priced at $16 per month. Last week, according to Fortune, X plans to enable all users to utilize Grok for composing posts.