Elon Musk Announces Plans to Charge Fees to New Users on X Platform

The owner of X company (formerly known as Twitter), billionaire Elon Musk, is considering the introduction of a "small fee" for new users to interact with the platform. Paid features may include posting messages, likes, and bookmarking favorite posts.

In this way, the entrepreneur aims to address the issue of automated accounts or "bots."

"Current AI (and troll farms) can easily bypass the question 'are you a bot?'," Elon Musk wrote in his social media post.

The exact amount of this "small fee" and when it will be introduced was not specified by the billionaire. However, in another post on X, the businessman explained that this measure would last for three months.

It is assumed that new users will be prohibited from creating content, tweeting, liking posts, or bookmarking messages. However, access to social networks will still be possible without payment.

As Euronews points out, a similar measure was implemented in New Zealand and the Philippines last October, where new unverified users were charged €0.94 per year for interacting with messages.

The X platform charges users in New Zealand and the Philippines for maintaining key functions on the social networking site.

Currently, the only paid features for X are intended for premium subscribers, providing access to the monetization program, ad-free versions, access to the X chatbot with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and greater visibility of responses.