X will charge all its users a monthly payment to use its services

Twitter update: Elon Musk is planning to charge a ‘small monthly payment’ for using the X (formerly Twitter) platform. Musk floated the idea in a live conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He cited the problem of bots on the platform behind the idea of charging a ‘small monthly payment’ for the use of X services. According to Musk, such changes are necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform. He said that this is the only way he can think of to combat vast armies of bots. Further explaining his new idea, Musk said that creating a bot costs a fraction of a penny, which is around a tenth of a penny, but if the creator of the bot has to pay a few dollars, the effective cost of bots is very high, and they will need a new payment method every time a bot creator wanted to make another bot.

Elon Musk did not give much detail on what will be the cost of the new subscription plan but only described it as a ‘small amount of money’. However, this is not the first time Elon Musk has expressed his desire to charge everyone for using X. TechCrunch via Platformer reported that Musk was thinking about putting all Twitter users behind a paywall last year.

Musk has been trying to deal with the problem of bots on X for quite some time now and is trying different methods. In early July this year, Musk put “temporary” limits on the number of tweets users can read on Twitter. He blamed data scraping by new AI startups for his decision at that time.

Musk and Netanyahu’s conversation was focused on AI technology and its regulation and during the conversation, Musk also shared that the platform has now 550 million users. He said that these users generate 100 to 200 million posts every day. X is yet to disclose the number of paid subscribers that the platform has but some independent research suggests that X Premium has not attracted a majority of X users. 

Meanwhile, X has banned a record 12,80,107 accounts in India between July 26 and August 25, mostly for promoting child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity.